Question

I’m trying to convert given string in format 1899-12-30 19:00:00.000 to date using this function:

$startDate = strtotime("1899-12-30 19:00:00.000");

but as a result I get a wrong date, e.g.

30.10.2008 00:00:00

what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Use DateTime:

$date = DateTime::createFromFormat( 'Y-m-d H:i:s.u', '1899-12-30 19:00:00.000', new DateTimeZone( 'America/New_York'));
echo $date->getTimestamp() . ' ' . $date->format( 'Y-m-d H:i:s');

Note that this will be a negative value since it’s before Jan 1st, 1970. The above code outputs:

-2209093200 1899-12-30 19:00:00 

Make sure you set the correct timezone in the constructor to DateTimeZone (or you can omit it to leave it as default).