Question

I am trying to convert string month name to month number,

but why do I get ’03’ in the result for ‘Feb’ in,

strtolower(date('m', strtotime('Feb')));

I tested with other month names and they seem to be fine,

strtolower(date('m', strtotime('Jan'))); // 01
strtolower(date('m', strtotime('Mar'))); // 03

What have done wrong?

Answer 1

From the php.net manual:

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 now, or the current time if now is not supplied.

This results in a mixture of todays date (January 30th) and “Feb” => February 30th – but this is not a valid date, so PHP returns the month number for March.

Trying something like

strtotime('01 Feb')

should solve the problem.