I've had a little trouble with this function in the past because (as some people have pointed out) you can't really set a locale for strtotime. If you're American, you see 11/12/10 and think "12 November, 2010". If you're Australian (or European), you think it's 11 December, 2010. If you're a sysadmin who reads in ISO, it looks like 10th December 2011.
The best way to compensate for this is by modifying your joining characters. Forward slash (/) signifies American M/D/Y formatting, a dash (-) signifies European D-M-Y and a period (.) signifies ISO Y.M.D.
Observe:
<?php
echo date("jS F, Y", strtotime("11.12.10"));
// outputs 10th December, 2011
echo date("jS F, Y", strtotime("11/12/10"));
// outputs 12th November, 2010
echo date("jS F, Y", strtotime("11-12-10"));
// outputs 11th December, 2010
?>
Hope this helps someone!
strtotime
(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)
strtotime — Parse about any English textual datetime description into a Unix timestamp
Description
strtotime
( string
$datetime
, int|null $baseTimestamp = null
) : int|false
The function expects to be given a string containing an English date format
and will try to parse that format into a Unix timestamp (the number of
seconds since January 1 1970 00:00:00 UTC), relative to the timestamp given
in baseTimestamp, or the current time if
baseTimestamp is not supplied.
Warning
The Unix timestamp that this function returns does not contain information about time zones. In order to do calculations with date/time information, you should use the more capable DateTimeImmutable.
Each parameter of this function uses the default time zone unless a time zone is specified in that parameter. Be careful not to use different time zones in each parameter unless that is intended. See date_default_timezone_get() on the various ways to define the default time zone.
Parameters
-
datetime -
A date/time string. Valid formats are explained in Date and Time Formats.
-
baseTimestamp -
The timestamp which is used as a base for the calculation of relative dates.
Return Values
Returns a timestamp on success, false otherwise.
Errors/Exceptions
Every call to a date/time function will generate a E_NOTICE
if the time zone is not valid, and/or a E_STRICT
or E_WARNING message
if using the system settings or the TZ environment
variable. See also date_default_timezone_set()
Changelog
| Version | Description |
|---|---|
| 8.0.0 |
baseTimestamp is nullable now.
|
Examples
Example #1 A strtotime() example
<?php
echo strtotime("now"), "\n";
echo strtotime("10 September 2000"), "\n";
echo strtotime("+1 day"), "\n";
echo strtotime("+1 week"), "\n";
echo strtotime("+1 week 2 days 4 hours 2 seconds"), "\n";
echo strtotime("next Thursday"), "\n";
echo strtotime("last Monday"), "\n";
?>
Example #2 Checking for failure
<?php
$str = 'Not Good';
// previous to PHP 5.1.0 you would compare with -1, instead of false
if (($timestamp = strtotime($str)) === false) {
echo "The string ($str) is bogus";
} else {
echo "$str == " . date('l dS \o\f F Y h:i:s A', $timestamp);
}
?>
Notes
Note:
If the number of the year is specified in a two digit format, the values between 00-69 are mapped to 2000-2069 and 70-99 to 1970-1999. See the notes below for possible differences on 32bit systems (possible dates might end on 2038-01-19 03:14:07).
Note:
The valid range of a timestamp is typically from Fri, 13 Dec 1901 20:45:54 UTC to Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 UTC. (These are the dates that correspond to the minimum and maximum values for a 32-bit signed integer.)
Prior to PHP 5.1.0, not all platforms support negative timestamps, therefore your date range may be limited to no earlier than the Unix epoch. This means that e.g. dates prior to Jan 1, 1970 will not work on Windows, some Linux distributions, and a few other operating systems.
For 64-bit versions of PHP, the valid range of a timestamp is effectively infinite, as 64 bits can represent approximately 293 billion years in either direction.
Note:
Dates in the
m/d/yord-m-yformats are disambiguated by looking at the separator between the various components: if the separator is a slash (/), then the Americanm/d/yis assumed; whereas if the separator is a dash (-) or a dot (.), then the Europeand-m-yformat is assumed. If, however, the year is given in a two digit format and the separator is a dash (-), the date string is parsed asy-m-d.To avoid potential ambiguity, it's best to use ISO 8601 (
YYYY-MM-DD) dates or DateTime::createFromFormat() when possible.
Note:
Using this function for mathematical operations is not advisable. It is better to use DateTime::add() and DateTime::sub() in PHP 5.3 and later, or DateTime::modify() in PHP 5.2.
See Also
- Date and Time Formats
- DateTime::createFromFormat() - Parses a time string according to a specified format
- checkdate() - Validate a Gregorian date
- strptime() - Parse a time/date generated with strftime
add a note
User Contributed Notes 42 notes
sam at frontiermedia dot net dot au ¶
10 years ago
kumar AT swatantra.info Swatantra Kumar ¶
7 years ago
The "+1 month" issue with strtotime
===================================
As noted in several blogs, strtotime() solves the "+1 month" ("next month") issue on days that do not exist in the subsequent month differently than other implementations like for example MySQL.
<?php
echo date( "Y-m-d", strtotime( "2009-01-31 +1 month" ) ); // PHP: 2009-03-03
echo date( "Y-m-d", strtotime( "2009-01-31 +2 month" ) ); // PHP: 2009-03-31
?>
<?php
SELECT DATE_ADD( '2009-01-31', INTERVAL 1 MONTH ); // MySQL: 2009-02-28
?>
Stefan Kunstmann ¶
10 years ago
UK dates (eg. 27/05/1990) won't work with strotime, even with timezone properly set.
/*
However, if you just replace "/" with "-" it will work fine.
<?php
$timestamp = strtotime(str_replace('/', '-', '27/05/1990'));
?>
*/
[red., derick]: What you instead should do is:
<?php
$date = date_create_from_format('d/m/y', '27/05/1990');
?>
That does not make it a timestamp, but a DateTime object, which is much more versatile instead.
marlonsouza90 at hotmail dot com ¶
11 months ago
strtotime();
exemplo strtotime(date("Y-m-d") . "+1month");
A strtotime também funciona quando concatenamos strings,
joe at strtotime dot co dot uk ¶
6 years ago
A useful testing tool for strtotime() and unix timestamp conversion:
http://strtotime.co.uk/
cristinawithout ¶
9 years ago
WARNING when using "next month", "last month", "+1 month", "-1 month" or any combination of +/-X months. It will give non-intuitive results on Jan 30th and 31st.
As described at : http://derickrethans.nl/obtaining-the-next-month-in-php.html
<?php
$d = new DateTime( '2010-01-31' );
$d->modify( 'next month' );
echo $d->format( 'F' ), "\n";
?>
In the above, using "next month" on January 31 will output "March" even though you might want it to output "February". ("+1 month" will give the same result. "last month", "-1 month" are similarly affected, but the results would be seen at beginning of March.)
The way to get what people would generally be looking for when they say "next month" even on Jan 30 and Jan 31 is to use "first day of next month":
<?php
$d = new DateTime( '2010-01-08' );
$d->modify( 'first day of next month' );
echo $d->format( 'F' ), "\n";
?>
<?php
$d = new DateTime( '2010-01-08' );
$d->modify( 'first day of +1 month' );
echo $d->format( 'F' ), "\n";
?>
michal dot kocarek at brainbox dot cz ¶
11 years ago
strtotime() also returns time by year and weeknumber. (I use PHP 5.2.8, PHP 4 does not support it.) Queries can be in two forms:
- "yyyyWww", where yyyy is 4-digit year, W is literal and ww is 2-digit weeknumber. Returns timestamp for first day of week (for me Monday)
- "yyyy-Www-d", where yyyy is 4-digit year, W is literal, ww is 2-digit weeknumber and dd is day of week (1 for Monday, 7 for Sunday)
<?php
// Get timestamp of 32nd week in 2009.
strtotime('2009W32'); // returns timestamp for Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00
// Weeknumbers < 10 must be padded with zero:
strtotime('2009W01'); // returns timestamp for Mon, 29 Dec 2008 00:00:00
// strtotime('2009W1'); // error! returns false
// See timestamp for Tuesday in 5th week of 2008
strtotime('2008-W05-2'); // returns timestamp for Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:00:00
?>
Weeknumbers are (probably) computed according to ISO-8601 specification, so doing date('W') on given timestamps should return passed weeknumber.
shannon ¶
2 years ago
I tried using sams most popular example but got incorrect results.
Incorrect:
<?php
echo date("jS F, Y", strtotime("11.12.10"));
// outputs 10th December, 2011
echo date("jS F, Y", strtotime("11/12/10"));
// outputs 12th November, 2010
echo date("jS F, Y", strtotime("11-12-10"));
// outputs 11th December, 2010
?>
Then I read the notes which said:
if the separator is a slash (/), then the American m/d/y is assumed; whereas if the separator is a dash (-) or a dot (.), then the European d-m-y format is assumed. ***If, however, the year is given in a two digit format and the separator is a dash (-), the date string is parsed as y-m-d.***
Therefore, the above code does not work on 2 digit years - only 4 digit years
Steve GS ¶
3 years ago
The difference between 'today' and 'now' is the former strips off the time (setting it to 00:00, ie. midnight just past), and the latter includes the time - assuming UTC unless specified otherwise.
I run a theatre's website. Obviously, I need to ensure shows that have already happened do not appear on web pages, so I use something on the lines of:
$listIt = (strtotime($end_date) >= strtotime('today') ? 1 : 0);
where $end_date is the final date in a show series. So if tonight's show is the last, it will stay on the web page until 00:00 tomorrow.
I don't normally include performance times in the date field because some shows have matinées, others don't - so I use a free-form performance time field in the CMS instead (where even 'Time: TBD' is allowed). [The only instance where I DO include the time is when there are two different shows on the same day, to ensure they appear in chronological order.]
So strtotime($end_date) will always return the timestamp at 00:00 that day. If I instead used:
$listIt = (strtotime($end_date) >= strtotime('now') ? 1 : 0);
the function would return $listIt = 0 at all times today - something I don't want.
HTH
chris at teamsiems dot com ¶
11 years ago
It took me a while to notice that strtotime starts searching from just after midnight of the first day of the month. So, if the month starts on the day you search for, the first day of the search is actually the next occurrence of the day.
In my case, when I look for first Tuesday of the current month, I need to include a check to see if the month starts on a Tuesday.
<?php
if (date("l", strtotime("$thisMonth $thisYear"))=='Tuesday') {
echo "<p>This month starts on a Tuesday. Use \"$thisMonth $thisYear\" to check for first Tuesday.</p>\n";
} else {
echo "<p>This month does not start on a Tuesday. Use \"first tuesday $thisMonth $thisYear\" to check for first Tuesday.</p>\n";
}
?>
Killermonk ¶
11 years ago
You are not restricted to the same date ranges when running PHP on a 64-bit machine. This is because you are using 64-bit integers instead of 32-bit integers (at least if your OS is smart enough to use 64-bit integers in a 64-bit OS)
The following code will produce difference output in 32 and 64 bit environments.
var_dump(strtotime('1000-01-30'));
32-bit PHP: bool(false)
64-bit PHP: int(-30607689600)
This is true for php 5.2.* and 5.3
Also, note that the anything about the year 10000 is not supported. It appears to use only the last digit in the year field. As such, the year 10000 is interpretted as the year 2000; 10086 as 2006, 13867 as 2007, etc
me at will morgan dot co dot you kay ¶
8 years ago
For negative UNIX timestamps, strtotime seems to return the literal you passed in, or it may try to deduct the number of seconds from today's date.
To work around this behaviour, it appears that the same behaviour as described in the DateTime classes applies:
http://php.net/manual/en/datetime.construct.php
Specifically this line here (in the EN manual):
> The $timezone parameter and the current timezone are ignored when the $time parameter either is a UNIX timestamp (e.g. @946684800) or specifies a timezone (e.g. 2010-01-28T15:00:00+02:00).
Therefore strtotime('@-1000') returns 1000 seconds before the epoch.
Hope this helps.
vlad dot savitsky at gmail dot com ¶
2 years ago
Little bit unexpected behaviour for me. Small integers treats like time.
strtotime(0) => false,
strtotime(1) => false,
strtotime(12) => false,
strtotime(123) => false,
strtotime(1234) => 1528194840, //Time '12:34'
strtotime(12345) => false,
strtotime(123456) => 1528194896, // Time '12:34:56'
strtotime(1234567) => false,
strtotime(12345678) => false,
strtotime(123456789) => false,
x at xero dot nu ¶
10 years ago
strtotime is awesome for converting dates.
in this example i will make an RSS date, an
ATOM date, then convert them to a human
readable m/d/Y dates.
<?php
$rss = date("r");
$atom = date("c");
$human1 = date('m/d/Y', strtotime($rss));
$human2 = date('m/d/Y', strtotime($atom));
echo $rss."<br />".$atom."<br />".$human1."<br />".$human2;
?>
mirco dot babin at gmail dot com ¶
2 years ago
One important thing you should remember is that the timestamp value returned by time() is time-zone agnostic and gets the number of seconds since 1 January 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC. This means that at a particular point in time, this function will return the same value in the US, Europe, India, Japan, ...
strtotime() will convert a string WITHOUT a timezone indication as if the string is a time in the default timezone ( date_default_timezone_set() ). So converting a UTC time like '2018-12-06T09:04:55' with strtotime() actually yields a wrong result. In this case use:
<?php
function UTCdatestringToTime($utcdatestring)
{
$tz = date_default_timezone_get();
date_default_timezone_set('UTC');
$result = strtotime($utcdatestring);
date_default_timezone_set($tz);
return $result;
}
?>
Test:
<?php
$tz = 'Europe/Amsterdam';
$utctime = '2018-12-06T09:04:55';
if (!date_default_timezone_set($tz)) {
WriteLine('Setting default timezone to ' . $tz . ' failed');
die;
}
WriteLine();
WriteLine('Default timezone set to ' . $tz);
WriteLine('UTC time: ' . $utctime);
WriteLine();
WriteLine('[ UTCdatestringToTime ]');
$phptime = UTCdatestringToTime($utctime);
WriteLine('PHP time: ' . $phptime);
WriteTime($phptime, true);
WriteTime($phptime, false);
WriteLine();
WriteLine('-------------------------------------------------------------------------------');
WriteLine('[ strtotime($utctime) - Converts $utctime as if it was in timezone ' . $tz . ' because the string has no timezone specification ]');
$phptime = strtotime($utctime); //Seconds since the unix epoch
WriteLine('PHP time: ' . $phptime);
WriteTime($phptime, true);
WriteTime($phptime, false);
function WriteLine($text = '')
{
echo $text . "\r\n";
}
function WriteTime($time, bool $asUTC)
{
$tz = date_default_timezone_get();
if ($asUTC) date_default_timezone_set('UTC');
WriteLine('--> (' . date_default_timezone_get() . ') ' . date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $time));
if ($asUTC) date_default_timezone_set($tz);
}
?>
Test output:
<?php
Default timezone set to Europe/Amsterdam
UTC time: 2018-12-06T09:04:55
[ UTCdatestringToTime ]
PHP time: 1544087095
--> (UTC) 2018-12-06 09:04:55
--> (Europe/Amsterdam) 2018-12-06 10:04:55
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ strtotime($utctime) - Converts $utctime as if it was in timezone Europe/Amsterdam because the string has no timezone specification ]
PHP time: 1544083495
--> (UTC) 2018-12-06 08:04:55
--> (Europe/Amsterdam) 2018-12-06 09:04:55
*/
?>
Michael Muryn (MickoZ) ¶
9 years ago
[red.: This is a bug, and should be fixed. I have file an issue]
This comment apply to PHP5+
We can now do thing like this with strtotime:
<?php
$weekMondayTime = strtotime('Monday this week');
?>
However this works based on a week starting Sunday. I do not know if we can tweak this PHP behavior, anyone know?
If you want the timestamp of the start of the ISO Week (i.e. on Monday) as defined by ISO 8601, you can use this one liner:
<?php
$isoWeekStartTime = strtotime(date('o-\\WW')); // {isoYear}-W{isoWeekNumber}
?>
You can also find out the start of week of any time and format it into an ISO date with another one liner like this:
<?php
$isoWeekStartDate = date('Y-m-d', strtotime(date('o-\\WW', $time)));
?>
For more information about ISO-8601 and ISO week date:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Week_dates
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date
a dot fruchi at bit-runners dot com ¶
10 years ago
If you want to confront a date stored into mysql as a date field (not a datetime) and a date specified by a literal string, be sure to add "midnight" to the literal string, otherwise they won't match:
<?php
//I.E.: today is 17/02/2011
echo strtotime('2011-01-01'); //1293836400
echo strtotime('first day of last month'); //1293888128 Note: it's different from the previous one, since it computes also the seconds passed from midnight!!! So this one is always greater than simple '2011-01-01'
echo strtotime('midnight first day of last monty');//1293836400 Note: it's the same as '2011-01-01'
?>
kyle at frozenonline dot com ¶
17 years ago
I was having trouble parsing Apache log files that consisted of a time entry (denoted by %t for Apache configuration). An example Apache-date looks like: [21/Dec/2003:00:52:39 -0500]
Apache claims this to be a 'standard english format' time. strtotime() feels otherwise.
I came up with this function to assist in parsing this peculiar format.
<?php
function from_apachedate($date)
{
list($d, $M, $y, $h, $m, $s, $z) = sscanf($date, "[%2d/%3s/%4d:%2d:%2d:%2d %5s]");
return strtotime("$d $M $y $h:$m:$s $z");
}
?>
Hope it helps anyone else seeking such a conversion.
php at davidstockton dot com ¶
11 years ago
Adding a note to an already long page:
Try to be as specific as you can with the string you pass in. For example
<?php
echo date('F', strtotime('February'));
?>
is not specific enough. Depending on the day of the month, you may get a different response. For a non-leap year, you'll get March if the _current day of the month_ is the 29th, 30th or 31st. If it's a leap year, you'll get March on the 30th or 31st of the month. The same thing will happen on the 31st of any month when you pass in the name of any month with less than 31 days. This happens because the strtotime() function will fill in missing parts from the current day.
Assuming today is July 31, the timestamp returned by strtotime('February') will ultimately be seen as February 31 (non-existant obviously), which then is interpreted as March 3, thus giving a month name of March.
Interestingly, adding the year or the day will give you back the expected month.
nyctimus at yahoo dot com ¶
10 years ago
strtotime() produces different output on 32 and 64 bit systems running PHP 5.3.3 (as mentioned previously). This affects the "zero date" ("0000-00-00 00:00:00") as well as dates outside the traditional 32 date range.
strtotime("0000-00-00 00:00:00") returns FALSE on a 32 bit system.
strtotime("0000-00-00 00:00:00") returns -62169955200 on a 64 bit system.
fuhrysteve at gmail dot com ¶
12 years ago
Here's a hack to make this work for MS SQL's datetime junk, since strtotime() has issues with fractional seconds.
<?php
$MSSQLdatetime = "Feb 7 2009 09:48:06:697PM";
$newDatetime = preg_replace('/:[0-9][0-9][0-9]/','',$MSSQLdatetime);
$time = strtotime($newDatetime);
echo $time."\n";
?>
Anonymous ¶
11 years ago
This function DOES NOT work from left-to-right as one would think. This function parses the string as a whole, then applies the intervals by size (year, month, ...). Take the following example:
<?php
$Date = strtotime('2011-02-22'); // February 22nd, 2011. 28 days in this month, 29 next year.
echo date('n/j/Y', strtotime('+1 year, +7 days', $Date)); // add 1 year and 7 days. prints 2/29/2012
echo "<br />";
echo date('n/j/Y', strtotime('+7 days, +1 year', $Date)); // add 7 days and 1 year, but this also prints 2/29/2012
echo "<br />";
echo date('n/j/Y', strtotime('+1 year', strtotime('+7 days', $Date))); // this prints 3/1/2012, what the 2nd would do if it was left-to-right
?>
berniev ¶
2 months ago
In modern 64-bit systems (tested on mac) the old 1970 to 2038 date range limitations are gone.
strtotime("0001-10-30") gives int(-62109540728)
strtotime("6788-10-30") gives int(152067506400)
Black Hat Rocker ¶
3 months ago
*The case 30/11/-0001*
With the following note, I will report a particular behaviour of function strtotime() I want to call it «The case 30/11/-0001». It is very common and known but never reported here. Passing the input parameter '0000-00-00' to the function it returns a wrong and not supported timestamp value. It can be seen with these statement
<?php echo date('d/m/Y', strtotime('0000-00-00')); // returns 30/11/-0001 ?>
It seems there's no way to avoid that, but it is possibile to do workaround with if/3operator clausole simply as follow
<?php strcmp($date "0000-00-00")? date('d/m/Y', strtotime($date) ) : date('d/m/Y') ?>
Otherwise a simple way is to avoid to store to the DB the value '0000-00-00' and insert a default data value (i.e. with the mySQL function NOW() which sets the date on today's date)
Anonymous ¶
1 month ago
I appreciate all the DateTime responses but I do not get an accurate system date from DateTime only from strtotime in linux
marcodemaio at vanylla dot it ¶
10 years ago
NOTE: strtotime returns different values when the Week day does not match the date.
Simple example:
<?php
$d1 = strtotime("26 Oct 0010 12:00:00 +0100");
$d2 = strtotime("Tue, 26 Oct 0010 12:00:00 +0100");
$d3 = strtotime("Sun, 26 Oct 0010 12:00:00 +0100"); //But Oct 26 is a Tuesday, NOT a Sunday.
echo $d1; //ok 1288090800 that is "26 Ott 2010 - 11:00";
echo $d2; //ok 1288090800 that is "26 Ott 2010 - 11:00";
echo $d3; //WRONG! 1288522800 that is "31 Ott 2010 - 11:00";
?>
Sometime I found RSS feeds that contains week days that do not match the date.
A possible solution is to remove useless week day before passing the date string into strtotime, example:
<?php
$date_string = "Sun, 26 Oct 0010 12:00:00 +0100";
if( ($comma_pos = strpos($date_string, ',')) !== FALSE )
$date_string = substr($date_string, $comma_pos + 1);
$d3 = strtotime($date_string);
?>
Aleksandr ¶
2 years ago
We can get timestamp from RFC 2822:
<?php
$time = strtotime('Mon, 30 Jun 2014 11:30:00 +0400'); // timestamp from RFC 2822
echo date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $time); // 2014-06-30 10:30:00
?>
trurl at mcbyte dot net ¶
5 years ago
Be carefull with weekdays names
<?php echo date('r',strtotime("Thursday 01:15")), "\n"; ?>
returns something like "Thu, 17 Mar 2016 01:15:00 +0200"
but
<?php echo date('r',strtotime("Thursdays 01:15")), "\n"; ?>
returns "Thu, 17 Mar 2016 09:15:00 +0200".
So "s" at end mean "+8 hours".
Annomoys ¶
9 years ago
Strtotime() can be used to loop through date range.
as follows
<?php
$start = strtotime('2009-02-01');
$end = strtotime('2009-03-10');
$date = $start;
while($date < $end)
{
//write your code here
$date = strtotime("+1 day", $date);(counter)
}
?>
gabriel dot rempel at gmail dot com ¶
6 years ago
// small function auto detect to convert date
function formatDate($date)
{
if (strpos($date,'/') !== false) :
$date = str_replace('/', '-', $date);
$date = date('Y-m-d h:i:s', strtotime($date));
else :
$date = date('d-m-Y h:i:s', strtotime($date));
$date = str_replace('-', '/', $date);
endif;
return $date;
}
Travis Pulley ¶
11 years ago
Be aware that if you are running 5.2.8, there is a memory leak with this function and it could cost someone valuable time finding out what the problem was. Per usual, running the latest (minor) version tends to be a good idea.
See here: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=46889
peixoto at live dot com ¶
7 years ago
<?php strtotime('-5 weeks monday') ?> returns the monday of 5 weeks ago.
kooshal at live dot com ¶
11 years ago
when using PHP 5.3, you must use date_default_timezone_set() to set the time zone otherwise you will get warning similar to this (if you have display_errors=On)—
Warning: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Asia/Dubai' for '4.0/no DST' instead in path/to/php/script.php
on line ##
Example:
date_default_timezone_set('Indian/Mauritius');
For a list of supported timezones in PHP, see http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php
Anonymous ¶
7 years ago
Be aware that you cannot rely on this function alone to validate a date, as it will accept insane dates like the 31st of February.
Also, the '... week' functionality by itself may not do what you expect. If used on a Sunday, 'next week' will not return a timestamp of the next Monday, but of the Monday after that. Similarly, a timestamp for the Monday of the current week is returned when 'previous/last week' is used and 'this week' returns a stamp of the Monday of the next week (i.e. the following day). This is not the 'week starts on Sunday' effect, as that would mean all the timestamps returned would have to be on a Sunday and none of them are.
viper7 at viper-7 dot com ¶
11 years ago
Observed date formats that strtotime expects, it can be quite confusing, so hopefully this makes things a little clearer for some.
mm/dd/yyyy - 02/01/2003 - strtotime() returns : 1st February 2003
mm/dd/yy - 02/01/03 - strtotime() returns : 1st February 2003
yyyy/mm/dd - 2003/02/01 - strtotime() returns : 1st February 2003
dd-mm-yyyy - 01-02-2003 - strtotime() returns : 1st February 2003
yy-mm-dd - 03-02-01 - strtotime() returns : 1st February 2003
yyyy-mm-dd - 2003-02-01 - strtotime() returns : 1st February 2003
Sui Dream ¶
3 years ago
It was really pazzling to me to read about parsing a string into a Unix timestamp relative to both January 1 1970 00:00:00 UTC and the second parameter. Maybe it worth noting that the second parameter is for relative dates (like "+1 day").
Andrey Kabakchiev ¶
5 years ago
Actually the top-voted comment from 'sam at frontiermedia dot net dot au' is not quite right, as is the documentation Note. The correct assumptions made by strtotime() are:
Forward slashes (/) assume US formatted dates, e.g mm/dd/yy
Periods (.) assume Non-US dates, e.g dd.mm.yy
Hypens (-) assume ISO 8601 (ATOM) formatted dates, e.g yy-mm-dd
ivijan dot stefan at gmail dot com ¶
3 years ago
In some countries I noticed that people storing in database strings like 20h or 20u what is equal to 20:00 and 21h30 or 21u30 what is equal to 21:30.
strtotime() not understand that string and comparing or time modulation can be tricky. Because of that I wrote one good solution for it:
<?php
function bo_strtotime($string)
{
if(preg_match('/([0-9]+)[uh]{1}/i',$string))
{
$string = preg_replace(array('/[uh]/i','/:(?![0-9]+)/'), array(':',':00'), $string);
}
return strtotime($string);
}
?>
This small function acts same like strtotime() only it accept 20u and 20h and convert into normal time, after that in normal unix timestamp.
alex at newpathconsulting dot com ¶
4 years ago
Be careful when sending a NULL string to strtotime() - it evaluates NULL to 0 and thus returns the UNIX timestamp at 0 (December 31, 1969).
Can evaluate the string first like so ($dateString contains string):
$dateString ? date('d-m-Y', strtotime($dateString ))
jhonnymakis at gmail dot com ¶
3 years ago
Should output '2017-06-30' but show '2017-07-01'
$d = new DateTime( '2017-07-31' );
$d->modify( 'last month' );
echo $d->format( 'Y-m-d' );
sgutauckis ¶
14 years ago
The following might produce something different than you might expect:
<?php
echo date('l, F jS Y', strtotime("third wednesday", strtotime("2006-11-01"))) . "<br>";
echo date('l, F jS Y', strtotime("third sunday", strtotime("2006-01-01")));
?>
Produces:
Wednesday, November 22nd 2006
Sunday, January 22nd 2006
The problem stems from strtotime when the requested day falls on the date passed to strtotime. If you look at your calendar you will see that they should return:
Wednesday, November 15th 2006
Sunday, January 15th 2006
Because the date falls on the day requested it skips that day.
