Question

I am building a timestamp from the date, month and year values entered by users.

Suppose that the user inputs some wrong values and the date is “31-02-2012” which does not exist, then I have to get a false return. But here its converting it to another date nearby. Precisely to: “02-03-2012”..

I dont want this to happen..

$str = "31-02-2012";
echo date("d-m-Y",strtotime($str)); // Outputs 02-03-2012

Can anyone help? I dont want a timestamp to be returned if the date is not original.

Answer 1

That’s because strtotime() has troubles with - since they are used to denote phrase like -1 week, etc…

Try

$str = '31-02-2012';
echo date('d-m-Y', strtotime(str_replace('-', '/', $str)));

However 31-02-2012 is not a valid English format, it should be 02-31-2012.

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If you have PHP >= 5.3, you can use createFromFormat:

$str = '31-02-2012';
$d = DateTime::createFromFormat('d-m-Y', $str);
echo $d->format('d-m-Y');