[RESOLVED] Date validation driving me mad

baffled_in_UK

Hi,

I have a site that allows holiday booking enquiries. I'm doing some validation on the dates entered and frankly I'm baffled. What I want to do is ensure Arrival and Departure Dates are greater than today's date and that Arrival date is not after Departure Date. All dates are entered in dd/mm/yyyy format. What I'm doing is running the Current Date, Arrival date and Departure Date through strtotime and then comparing the results, however I can't figure out why the following happens.

Code extract:

$curdate=date("d/m/Y"); 
$date1=strtotime($curdate);
$date2=strtotime($_POST[arrival]);
$date3=strtotime($_POST[depart]);

this is the result of an echo on all the above values :

today=12/09/2007 and 1197158400
arrival=11/09/2007 and 1194566400
depart= 14/08/2007 and 1202428800

The dates shown above are what's in $curdate and the $_POST values and the numbers are the strtotime results.

So, why does the Departure Date come back with a number greater than the others when the date is obviously before them?

bpat1434

I'm going to say it's because you're not using a proper date format as noted here » Date Input Formats

I've run this test:

<?php

$dmy['today'] = '12/09/2007';
$dmy['arrival'] = '11/09/2007';
$dmy['departure'] = '14/08/2007';

$mdy['today'] = '09/12/2007';
$mdy['arrival'] = '09/11/2007';
$mdy['departure'] = '08/14/2007';

echo '<h3>d/m/Y Format</h3>
<pre>Today ....: ' . strtotime($dmy['today']) . '
Arrival ..: ' . strtotime($dmy['arrival']) . '
Departure : ' . strtotime($dmy['departure']) . '</pre>

<h3>m/d/Y Format</h3>
<pre>Today ....: ' . strtotime($mdy['today']) . '
Arrival ..: ' . strtotime($mdy['arrival']) . '
Departure : ' . strtotime($mdy['departure']) . '</pre>';

?>

and gotten the following output:

d/m/Y Format

Today ....: 1197176400
Arrival ..: 1194584400
Departure : 

m/d/Y Format

Today ....: 1189569600
Arrival ..: 1189483200
Departure : 1187064000

So it would seem that you need to reformat the date inputs... If they're always the same format (dd/mm/YYYY) then you can just explode them on the "/" or substr it to get the items you need to format it properly.

baffled_in_UK

Thanks. Bit of a farce having to do that but it works.