Question

Hallo, I want to find the difference between today and another date,

convert todays date into unix time format here

 <?php
    echo '1st one'.strtotime(date("d.m.Y")).'<br>';
    echo '2nd one'.strtotime(date("m.d.Y")).'<br>';
    ?>

The first echo is producing some value, but not the second one. What is the bug in it…please help..

Answer 1

strtotime makes assumptions based on the date format you give it. For instance

date("Y-m-d", strtotime(date("d.m.Y"))) //=> "2010-09-27"
date("Y-m-d", strtotime(date("m.d.Y"))) //=> "1969-12-31"

Note that when given an invalid date, strtotime defaults to the timestamp for 1969-12-31 19:00:00, so when you end up with an unexpected date in 1969, you know you’re working with an invalid date.

Because strtotime is looking for day.month.year when you use . as the delimiter, so it sees “9.27.2010” as the 9th day of the 27th month, which obviously doesn’t exist.

However, if you change it to use / as the delimiter:

date("Y-m-d", strtotime(date("d/m/Y"))) //=> "1969-12-31"
date("Y-m-d", strtotime(date("m/d/Y"))) //=> "2010-09-27"

In this case, strtotime expects dates in month/day/year format.

If you want to be safe, Y-m-d is generally a good format to use.