Question

I am trying to validate a date in PHP but I am getting an “Invalid date format” error even though I supplied the correct date format. My PHP version is 5.3.8.

Here is my code, please let me know what you think:

try
{   
    $validDate = new DateTime("2/2/2011");
    echo "valid format";
}
catch(Exception $e) 
{   
    echo "Date Incident Occurred: Invalid Date format!";
}

Answer 1

Have you tried inspecting the exception? It’s trying very hard to tell you what happened. That’s its entire reason for existence. If you really are supplying a valid date, I will bet the exception is telling you something like this:

‘DateTime::__construct(): It is not safe to rely on the system’s
timezone settings. You are required to use the date.timezone setting
or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of
those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely
misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected ‘America/New_York’ for
‘EST/-5.0/no DST’ instead’