[RESOLVED] Convert Date() to Time()

Hello I have a date in a string formatted like so: "d/m/y-H:i:s" using the date function. I want to convert that specific formatted date to a UTC time. Since I need to be able to compare other dates to this one.

How do I do this?

If you used date() to format it, could you not simply save the pre-formatted timestamp in a separate variable?

I thought of that at first but the issue is that a third party program is generating the date format in a text file. I need to read the text file to determine if the date is greater than the current date minus one hour.

So you see that I have no control over the generated date in the text file. I just need to retrieve the date from the text file and run a few comparisons on it.

if you are using PHP 5.3, you can use date_parse_from_format():

PHP Code:

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<?php
  
  header("Content-type: text/plain");
  
  date_default_timezone_set("America/Denver");
  
  $format = "d/m/y-H:i:s";
  
  $date = date_parse_from_format($format, date($format));
  
  $timestamp = mktime($date['hour'], $date['minute'], $date['second'], $date['month'], $date['day'], $date['year']);
  
  print_r($date);
  
  echo $timestamp;
?>

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if you are not using PHP 5.3, you'll have to parse the date and use mktime() to convert it to a Unix timestamp, and from there you can use date() to convert it however you'd like. functions like strtotime() won't work because the format your dates are in is unsupported.

Since I'm not using PHP 5.3 I ended up just using substr's, it's not very flexible when it comes to changing the formats but it will suit my current needs.

Code:

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$format = "d/m/y-H:i:s";
$date = array();
$date['day'] = substr($currDate,0,2);
$date['month'] = substr($currDate,3,2);
$date['year'] = substr($currDate,6,2);
$date['hour'] = substr($currDate,9,2);
$date['minute'] = substr($currDate,12,2);
$date['second'] = substr($currDate,15,2);
$currTimestamp = mktime($date['hour'], $date['minute'], $date['second'], $date['month'], $date['day'], $date['year']);

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