Question

How do I convert the following string:

24 May, 2012, 00:00am

to a format like:

$today = date("D M j G:i:s T Y");               // Sat Mar 10 17:16:18 MST 2001

I’ve tried the following:

$date = date('D M j G:i:s T Y', strtotime("24 May, 2012, 00:00am"));

But all I get is:

Thu Jan 1 0:00:00 UTC 1970

I’m considering exploding the string and then running it through mktime() but I am wondering if there is a better way to do this?

Answer 1

I would use the DateTime class and the createFromFormat function, which allows you to parse a date according to a format that you define.

In this case:

$date = DateTime::createFromFormat("d M, Y, h:ia", "24 May, 2012, 00:00am");

You can then use the other DateTime functions to manipulate this.

Note that the date you provide is in fact incorrect by any standard: you either mean 00:00 or 12:00am.