Strtotime oddity

[loll]

Hi,

Im trying to use strtotime() to convert a string into a timestamp for further use.

when the regular date() function is used, if its an invalid date, it figures out what the right date should be

eg. if you enter the date as feb 30 the date command works that out as being march 2nd

however im having trouble with this with strtotime.

if i enter this: echo date("Ymd",strtotime("31 November $year")) . "<BR>";

it prints out: 20091201 which is good

however, if i use: echo date("Ymd",strtotime("32 November $year")) . "<BR>";

it displays: 19691231

while I understand that both of these dates are invalid dates, shouldnt PHP be either, displaying 19691231 for both dates (because they are invalid dates), or display the correct date for both of them.

How come it figures out the correct date for one, but not the other? just seems a bit weird.

[NogDog]

Sounds like it does a rudimentary check for a day number > 31 and simply returning false (or -1 in earlier versions) which will then be interpreted as a timestamp of 0 if passed to date(), resulting in something around the "UNIX era" of 1970/01/01-00:00:00 adjusted for the applicable timezone. With current versions that return boolean false, you could use a "===" check first:

$ts = strtotime($string);
if($ts === false)
{
   // handle error
}
else
{
   $dateStr = date('Y/m/d', $ts);
}