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PHP checking if string matches pattern

Hello,

I would like to check if a string matches this pattern:

'yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm'

I am not sure how to do this will PHP.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Cheers,
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Julian Hansen
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Assumes 0 padded fields for month, day, hour and minute.

If you want to validate actual month / day values better to do that in code - working out leap years and different month values might be overly complex.

You can do this by modifying your preg_match call to

<?php
// RegEx pattern with () to save matched components into $matches array
$pattern = '/([0-9]{4})\-([0-9]{2})\-([0-9]{2}) ([0-9]{2}):([0-9]{2})/';
$string = '2012-11-21 12:45';
echo preg_match($pattern, $string, $matches);
echo "<pre>";
// $matches now holds yyyy, mm, dd, hh, mm in array values 1-5
print_r($matches);
echo "</pre>";
?>

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1Cougar

ASKER

Hi,

Thank you!  Your first answer works fine--all dates are 0 padded.

Many thanks for your help!