json date object to php date

Question

I am calling a webservice which return me back a json object. The json object encodes the date. I am trying to find a way to convert that date to m-d-Y format in php. Json

Answer 1

@Brombomb

Your Function works fine, but there is one thing you forgot. Timestamps can be negative for Dates before the 01.01.1970, so we need a different regEx

I used this one and it works fine:

preg_match( '/\/Date\((-?\d+)([+-]\d{4})\)/', $date, $matches);

At the end i modified your Function a little bit to become more usefull for me. Now i can decide if i get the Date back as

• "date" => date only
• "time" => time only
• "datetime" => date and time
• "array" => date and time as an array
• "string" => the timestamp as a string

and i can decide if i want the difference to the UTC timezone added/substracted when i give the third parameter...

function parseJsonDate($date, $type = 'date', $utc = 0) {
    // Match the time stamp (microtime) and the timezone offset (may be + or -) and also negative Timestamps
    preg_match( '/\/Date\((-?\d+)([+-]\d{4})\)/', $date, $matches);

    $seconds  = $matches[1]/1000;                // microseconds to seconds
    $UTCSec   = $matches[2]/100*60*60;           // utc timezone difference in seconds

    if($utc != 0){
        $seconds  = $seconds + $UTCSec; // add or divide the utc timezone difference
    }

    $date     = date( 'Y-m-d', $seconds );       // only date
    $dateTime = date( 'Y-m-d H:i:s', $seconds ); // date and time
    $time     = date( 'H:i:s', $seconds );       // only time

    switch($type)
    {
        case 'date':
            return $date; // returns 'YYYY-MM-DD'
            break;

        case 'datetime':
            return $dateTime; // returns 'YYYY-MM-DD HH:ii:ss'
            break;

        case 'time':
            return $time; // returns 'HH:ii:ss'
            break;

        case 'array':
            $dateArray = str_replace(" ", "-", $dateTime);
            $dateArray = str_replace(":", "-", $dateArray);
            return explode('-', $dateArray); // return array('YYYY', 'MM', 'DD', 'HH', 'ii', 'SS')
            break;

        case 'string':
            return $matches[1] . $matches[2]; // returns 1336197600000-0600
            break;
    }
}