[SOLVED] Convert german date string into date and check if its before today

Convert german date string into date and check if its before today

I have a string with my german date Freitag - 09. September 2022 - 14:00 (Format is: l - d. F Y - H:i). It need to be displayed in this format on my homepage thats why its in this format.

Now i want to parse this string into a date that i can check if the given date is before todays date (i only want to check day, month and year, so time is unnecessary).

I already tried a lot of things with strtotime and also DateTime::createFromFormat but nothing worked for me.

Is there any solution for that?

Solution

You can use the IntlDateFormatter to parse the German date. This requires the intl PHP extension.

$germanDateText  = 'Freitag - 09. September 2022 - 14:00';
$formatter       = new IntlDateFormatter('de-DE', IntlDateFormatter::FULL, IntlDateFormatter::FULL, 'Europe/Berlin', IntlDateFormatter::GREGORIAN, 'EEEE - dd. MMMM yyyy - HH:mm');
$germanTimestamp = $formatter->parse($germanDateText);
$germanDayStart  = strtotime(date('Y-m-d', $germanTimestamp));
$todayDayStart   = strtotime(date('Y-m-d'));

$isBeforeToday   = $germanDayStart < $todayDayStart;
var_dump($isBeforeToday);

Output

bool(true)