Twig Date Parser Filter

I've recently been working with joining Wufoo and DaPulse together happily in marriage and have made solid progress. However, one problem I encountered was the lack of consistency between Wufoo's POST data and API responses for their date fields. For example, I would get dates formatted as YYYYMMDD from the POST data received from their webhooks but I'd get YYYY-MM-DD whenever I sent an API request.

The problem I ran into with this was that Twig (and most likely PHP) could not create proper DateTime objects from the inconsistent data. Twig had to guess the date and I ended up getting August 20, 1970. Because a quick Google search didn't give me anything and I had to resolve this issue, I wrote a parse_date Twig filter to handle these types of situations.

Date: <p>{{ PostData | parse_date(["Ymd", "Y-m-d"]) | date("M d, Y") }}</p>

You may responsibly give it as many possible date formats you'd like to try and it'll return a DateTime object after it finds the first valid date; this DateTime object can now be used properly with the date filter. This filter uses DateTime::createFromFormat() to check which date format will work. This filter will also accept a single date format if you do not need to guess from an array of possible formats.