Jargons in array... Pls help explain

[shamuraq]

i saw this weird looking example when trying to learn preg_replace() function:

<?php
$patterns = array ('/(19|20)(\d{2})-(\d{1,2})-(\d{1,2})/',
                   '/^\s*{(\w+)}\s*=/');
$replace = array ('\3/\4/\1\2', '$\1 =');
echo preg_replace($patterns, $replace, '{startDate} = 1999-5-27');

?>

Output:

5/27/1999

Can anyone pls explain what the jargons in $pattern and $replace means?

 

[Zane]

that jargon is called regex...  this particular flavor is PCRE...the other is called POSIX

 

In short...all the script does is take an input of YYYY-MM-DD and output it as MM/DD/YYYY

 

this can easily be done a simpler way..such as

$startDate = '2008-03-24';
$startDate = date('n/j/Y',strtotime($startDate));
echo $startDate;

 

[nrg_alpha]

You can learn more about pcre in that link, as well as the following resources:

 

http://www.regular-expressions.info/

http://weblogtoolscollection.com/regex/regex.php

http://www.phpfreaks.com/forums/index.php/topic,127902.0.html (obviously, there is more if you google it).

 

That should be enough to get you started.

[.josh]

that jargon is called regex...  this particular flavor is PCRE...the other is called POSIX

 

In short...all the script does is take an input of YYYY-MM-DD and output it as MM/DD/YYYY

 

this can easily be done a simpler way..such as

$startDate = '2008-03-24';
$startDate = date('n/j/Y',strtotime($startDate));
echo $startDate;

 

 

couple things with that though:

 

1) it does not preserve original (lack of) 0 padding

2) it only addresses the date part of that regex