Perhaps you may want to do this in a twisted & convoluted fashion (ie. within a function that uses Regex and a Looping Construct to fetch the data you need). Consider this Function below. It is worth noting that though it may appear twisted & convoluted, you are not limited to just getting the Date value. This means you also have access to all the key-value Pairs in that file: in case you need to at some point...
<?php $file = __DIR__ . "/file.txt"; //<== THE NAME OF THE FILE CONTAINING YOUR DATA /*************** BEGIN FUNCTIONS ***************/ function parseFile($file){ $arrFileContent = []; // IF THE FILE DOES NOT EXIST RETURN NULL if(!file_exists($file)){ return null; } // GET THE DATA FROM THE FILE & STORE IT IN A VARIABLE $strFileDataContent = file_get_contents($file); // IF THE FILE CONTAINS NOTHING RETURN NULL AS WELL if(empty($strFileDataContent)){ return null; } // SPLIT THE CONTENTS OF THE FILE (STRING) AT THE END OF EACH LINE // THUS CREATING AN ARRAY OF LINES OF TEXT-DATA $arrFileDataLines = explode("\n", $strFileDataContent); // LOOP THROUGH THE ARRAY PRODUCED ABOVE & PERFORM SOME PATTERN MATCHING // AND TEXT EXTRACTION WITHIN THE LOOP foreach($arrFileDataLines as $iKey=>$lineData){ $arrSubLines = explode("\n", $lineData); foreach($arrSubLines as $intKey=>$strKeyInfo){ $rxClass = "#(^@class:)(\s*)(.*$)#i"; $rxSpan = "#(^span:)(\s*)?(.+$)#si"; preg_match($rxClass, $strKeyInfo, $matches); preg_match($rxSpan, $strKeyInfo, $matches2); if($matches) { list(, $key, $null, $val) = $matches; $keyA = str_replace("rtm_", "", $val); if (!array_key_exists($keyA, $arrFileContent)) { $arrFileContent[$keyA] = $val; } } if($matches2) { list(, $key2, $null, $val2) = $matches2; $keyB = $keyA ."Data"; if (!array_key_exists($keyB, $arrFileContent)) { $arrFileContent[$keyB] = parseSpanValues($val2, str_replace("rtm_", "", $keyA)); } } } } return $arrFileContent; } function parseSpanValues($spanData, $prefix){ $arrSpanData = explode(", ", preg_replace("#[\{\}\[\]\"\'\#\@]#", "", $spanData)); $objSpanData = new stdClass(); $cleanVal = ""; if($prefix == "tags"){ $cnt = 0; foreach($arrSpanData as $i=>$val){ if(!stristr($val, ":")){ $cleanVal .= ", " . $val ; $cnt++; } } $arrSpanData[2] = $arrSpanData[2] . $cleanVal; array_splice($arrSpanData, 3, $cnt); } foreach($arrSpanData as $iKey=>&$spanVal){ $arrSplit = preg_split("#\:\s#", $cleanVal . $spanVal); $key = "text"; if($iKey == 0){ $key = "{$prefix}Text"; }else if($iKey == 1){ $key = "{$prefix}TextClass"; }else if($iKey == 2){ $key = "{$prefix}Value"; }else if($iKey == 3){ $key = "{$prefix}ValueClass"; } if(isset($arrSplit[1])){ $objSpanData->$key = $arrSplit[1]; } } return $objSpanData; } /*************** END OF FUNCTIONS ***************/ var_dump(parseFile($file)); // PRODUCES SOMETHING LIKE: array (size=10)'due' => string 'rtm_due' (length=7)'dueData' => object(stdClass)[1] public 'dueText' => string 'Due' (length=3) public 'dueTextClass' => string 'rtm_due_title' (length=13) public 'dueValue' => string 'Sat 16 Jul 16' (length=13) public 'dueValueClass' => string 'rtm_due_value' (length=13)'priority' => string 'rtm_priority' (length=12)'priorityData' => object(stdClass)[2] public 'priorityText' => string 'Priority' (length=8) public 'priorityTextClass' => string 'rtm_priority_title' (length=18) public 'priorityValue' => string '1' (length=1) public 'priorityValueClass' => string 'rtm_priority_value' (length=18)'tags' => string 'rtm_tags' (length=8)'tagsData' => object(stdClass)[3] public 'tagsText' => string 'Tags' (length=4) public 'tagsTextClass' => string 'rtm_tags_title' (length=14) public 'tagsValue' => string 'gcal-work, github, stack-overflow' (length=33) public 'text' => string 'rtm_tags_value' (length=14)'location' => string 'rtm_location' (length=12)'locationData' => object(stdClass)[4] public 'locationText' => string 'Location' (length=8) public 'locationTextClass' => string 'rtm_location_title' (length=18) public 'locationValue' => string 'none' (length=4) public 'locationValueClass' => string 'rtm_location_value' (length=18)'list' => string 'rtm_list' (length=8)'listData' => object(stdClass)[5] public 'listText' => string 'List' (length=4) public 'listTextClass' => string 'rtm_list_title' (length=14) public 'listValue' => string 'Work' (length=4) public 'listValueClass' => string 'rtm_list_value' (length=14)So as it is right now, if you wanted to get the date for the first instance in the Array [Element dueData], you can simply do something like this:
<? php $data = parseFile($file); $dateDateValue = $data['dueData']->dueValue; var_dump($dateDateValue); // PRODUCES:: 'Sat 16 Jul 16'Hope this attempts (at all) to give you a vague idea on how to improvise on your own.
Cheers & Good Luck!!!