将奇怪的格式化时间戳分成可理解的日期

Question

I'm working with an XML document that is returning variables and for some reason in a xml return the timestamp is formatted like this... 20180606T110000 ... why anyone would format it like that makes no sense to me; however, its what I have to work with. ITs formatted YYYYMMDD , the T is the split between date and time, HHMMSS. ITs set up in a 24 Hour clock that I also need to convert to 12 hr clock with am/pm

I need that formatted like 06/06/2018 11:00:00 AM.

Is there a way to do that via a date format (I know how to use date() but I don't know how to bring in that timestamp the way its formatted) or even separating it out into

$year = xxxx 
$month = xx 
$day = $xx 
$Hour=xx 
etc. etc. etc. 

if need be.

I've briefly looked at php's date create from format ( date_create_from_format('j-M-Y', '15-Feb-2009') ) but dont fully understand how that works.

I've also thought about a split. I've also looked at chunk_split and wordwrap but its not even amounts of characters so that would be complex to create.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The format you're working with is "XMLRPC (Compact)" format. This is fully supported by PHP (you can see a list of supported formats here). To get what you want, just use a combination of strtotime() and date().

$timestring = "20180606T110000";

$timestamp = strtotime($timestring);

echo date("m/d/Y h:i:s A", $timestamp);