Add to Favorites
useful php function, strtotime
Jun 06, 2008
by
0
PHP has a lovely little function called strtotime. Many of you know how useful it is, but some of you may be looking for an easy quick way to do some simple date calculations.If you wanted to find what day is two weeks and 1 day from now, you could do something as simple as:
[code]
$the_day = date('m/d/Y',strtotime('+2 week +1 day'));
[/code]
It is really that simple. You can also use this function for a quick conversion of user input/database fields to a Unix timestamp for further manipulation.
[code]
$database_time = strtotime( $database_arr['date'] );
// strtotime will handle the common format YYYY-MM-DD
$user_input_date = strtotime( $_POST['date'] );
[/code]
strtotime will handle a variety of date formats, almost anything a user could throw at you such as:
- January 3, 2008
- Jan 3, 2008
- 01/03/2008
- next thursday
If the user does happen to give you something that strtotime can't recognize, it will return false ( as long as you have a later version of php, otherwise it may return -1 )
So there you have it, the useful little function strtotime.
Leave a comment
To leave a comment, please log in / sign up
RSS Feed
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
YouTube