Question

I using PHP’s strtotime function for converting date from one format to another
i have the following

$date = "12-22-2011";

 echo $newDateFormat = date("Y-m-d", strtotime($date) );

// Output 1970-01-01
// But when i replace "-"  with "/" I get proper output
$date = "12/22/2011";

echo $newDateFormat = date("Y-m-d", strtotime($date) );

// Output 2011-12-22 

Why so ?
or is there any other function which accepts anything and convert to proper date format ?

Answer 1

From the strtotime documentation:

Dates in the m/d/y or d-m-y formats are disambiguated by looking at the separator between the various components: if the separator is a slash (/), then the American m/d/y is assumed; whereas if the separator is a dash (-) or a dot (.), then the European d-m-y format is assumed.

Essentially, hyphenated dates are assumed to be d-m-y, and never m-d-y.

For customised parsing, use DateTime::createFromFormat().