You can easily extract time information from a string with a regular expression and PHP (or any language with regular expressions).
$str = "Here is how to extract time info.. like 4:30 PM and 2:10 AM from a string in PHP";
$rgx = "/\d{1,2}(:?\d{1,2})?\s?(A|P)M/i";
preg_match_all($rgx, $str, $matches);
var_dump($matches);
This will give use the following array.
array(3) {
[0]=>
array(2) {
[0]=>
string(7) "4:30 PM"
[1]=>
string(7) "2:10 AM"
}
[1]=>
array(2) {
[0]=>
string(3) ":30"
[1]=>
string(3) ":10"
}
[2]=>
array(2) {
[0]=>
string(1) "P"
[1]=>
string(1) "A"
}
}
We can see the results we want are in the first item in the array. Calling
var_dump($matches[0]);
Will give use the results we want without the other matches. Note this is case insensitive
and supports times like 2pm
or 12:30pm
as well.
Just finishing up brewing up some fresh ground comments...