Question

I am trying to parse date strings without having to manipulate strings and expect a given format.

I want my user to be able to enter January 2, 2011 or 1-2-11, and still end up with 2011-01-02 12:00:00 to save in a database.

Currently, I have this in place:

$post_date = date("Y-m-d H:i:s", strtotime(stripslashes($_POST['post_date'])));

But it seems strtotime is returning 0, because the datetime ends up as 1969-12-31 17:00:00

What do I need to change?

---

UPDATE

From php.net:

(PHP 4, PHP 5)

strtotime — Parse about any English textual datetime description into a Unix timestamp.

..I guess not!

---

I am not trying to strtotime( an array:

if(isset($_POST['post_date'])){
                foreach($_POST['post_date'] as $id => $post_date){
                    print $post_date.'<br />';
                    if(strlen(trim($post_date)) && $post_date !== 'Date posted'){
                        $update_data[$id]['post_date'] = date("Y-m-d H:i:s", strtotime(stripslashes($post_date)));
                    }
                }
            }

---

Got it working with:

if(isset($_POST['post_date'])){
                foreach($_POST['post_date'] as $id => $post_date){
                    print $post_date.'<br />';
                    if(strlen(trim($post_date)) && $post_date !== 'Date posted'){
                        $post_date = str_replace(',', '', $post_date);
                        $post_date = str_replace('-', '/', $post_date);
                        $update_data[$id]['post_date'] = date("Y-m-d H:i:s", strtotime(stripslashes($post_date)));
                    }
                }
            }

Thanks to multiple contributors. I remove commas and replace hyphens with forward slashes.

Answer 1

From the comments the OP said :

$_POST[‘post_date’] is actually an array (updating multiple records),
but an example value would be ‘December 31, 2012’

You cannot pass a comma in the strtotime arguments alongside time, doing so would always return a 1970-01-01 00:00:00. You have to remove the user generated comma.

$post_date = date("Y-m-d H:i:s", strtotime(stripslashes("1 January 1927 17:59")));
echo $post_date; //1927-01-01 17:59:00