Parsing Twitter API Datestamp

Question

I'm using the twitter API to return a list of status updates and the times they were created. It's returning the creation date in the following format:

Fri Apr 09 12:53:54 +0000 2010

What's the simplest way (with PHP or Javascript) to format this like 09-04-2010?

Answer 1

JavaScript can parse that date if you remove the +0000 from the string:

var dStr = "Fri Apr 09 12:53:54 +0000 2010";
dStr = dStr.replace("+0000 ", "") + " UTC";
var d = new Date(dStr);

Chrome -- and I suspect some other non IE browsers -- can actually parse it with the +0000 present in the string, but you may as well remove it for interoperability.

PHP can parse the date with strtotime:

strtotime("Fri Apr 09 12:53:54 +0000 2010");

Answer 2

Here is date format for Twitter API:

Sat Jan 19 20:38:06 +0000 2013
"EEE MMM dd HH:mm:ss Z yyyy" 

Answer 3

Javascript. As @Andy pointed out, is going to be a bitch when it comes to IE. So it's best to rely on a library that does it consistently. DateJS seems like a nice library.

Once the library is added, you would parse and format it as:

var date = Date.parse("Fri Apr 09 12:53:54 +0000 2010");
var formatted = date.toString("dd-MM-yyyy");

In PHP you can use the date functions or the DateTime class to do the same (available since PHP 5.2.0):

$date = new DateTime("Fri Apr 09 12:53:54 +0000 2010");
echo $date->format("d-m-Y"); // 09-04-2010

Answer 4

strtotime("dateString"); gets it into the native PHP date format, then you can work with the date() function to get it printed out how you'd like it.

Answer 5

Cross-browser, time-zone-aware parsing via JavaScript:

var s = "Fri Apr 09 12:53:54 +0000 2010";

var date = new Date(
    s.replace(/^\w+ (\w+) (\d+) ([\d:]+) \+0000 (\d+)$/,
        "$1 $2 $4 $3 UTC"));

Tested on IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera.