Question

I want to create date with specific format for e.g 03-20-2010 have a format of m-d-Y but date function do not understand this date and returns wrong date

$date = date("Y-m-d", strtotime("03-20-2010"));

Above code is returning wrong date, what is the reason behind it and how to avoid wrong result? Few formats that I want date function to recognize are “Y/m/d” , “m/d/Y” , “F d, Y” , “M d, Y”.

Answer 1

strtotime won’t recognize an American style ordering separated by ‘-‘, but if you use a ‘/’ separator, it will work just fine.

$date = date("Y-m-d", strtotime(str_replace('-', '/', "03-20-2010")));

As Pekka notes, it’s better if your code explicity declares the format you are using.