Display of dates pre 1970

Anon

I keep getting "Warning: unexpected error in date()" when trying to process dates before 1970. Basically I have a database field with a date of birth in a standard date field (yyyy-mm-dd), and want to display the output as a birthday (e.g. 1st Jan). But, it fails for all the people who were born before 1970.

The codes I have tried are:

print date("jS M",strtotime($dob));

$y=substr($p[cdob],0,4);
$m=substr($p[cdob],5,2);
$d=substr($p[cdob],8,2);

print date("jS M",mktime(0,0,0,$m,$d,$y));

Any ideas on how to format these dates for display?

Anon

Further to this:

for ($x=1973;$x>1965;$x--) {
print date("d M Y",mktime(0,0,0,1,1,$x))."<BR>";
}

returns:

01 Jan 1973
01 Jan 1972
01 Jan 1971
Warning: unexpected error in date()
Warning: unexpected error in date()
Warning: unexpected error in date()
Warning: unexpected error in date()

brandonschnell

man time;

time returns the time since the Epoch (00:00:00 UTC, January 1, 1970), measured in seconds.

brandonschnell

mktime() has the same problem.

from the manual:

Returns the Unix timestamp corresponding to the arguments given. This timestamp is a long integer containing the number of seconds between the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970) and the time specified.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mktime.php

brandonschnell

personally, i'd use the mysql sql date functions.

http://www.mysql.com/doc/D/a/Date_and_time_functions.html

Anon

Yup, ended up using the query to format the time:

select *, date_format(dob,'%D %M') as bday ....

This works perfect.

Anon

There are several class libraries that support pre-1970 dates. One i like is

http://www.phpinsider.com/php/code/Date_Calc/