European Dates and Strtotime

There is this magic PHP function called strtotime which converts your date to a timestamp measured from 1 Jan 1970.  This makes sorting and manipulating arrays with dates a doddle. But only if you are in America, it’s a pain in the bum for the rest of the world.

And I’ll tell you why…

US Date formats

For some strange reason in the USA they format their dates: Month – Day – Year. It’s most bizarre and totally illogical. But it does mean if you have a form with a date field then it expects the date to be entered as MM/DD/YYYY or Mmm/DD/YY or some equivalent combination.

Everybody else in the World

The rest of the world uses the traditional and more logical DD/MM/YYYY format. If you enter a date as DD/MM/YYYY and convert to strtotime then convert back you get MM/DD/YYYY. Which is no good at all.

Using strtotime

It’s pretty easy:

[php]<?php
$date = ‘8/6/2013’;
$timestamp = strtotime($date);
echo $timestamp;
?>[/php]

This will return ‘ 1375747200’ which represents 6 August 2013.  But this is no good outside the USA where we all think the date is 8 June 2013.

Fixing the problem

There are all sorts of workarounds that will take a Non-US format and convert it into US format so you can use strtotime but they are all a bit flaky and not that easy to use.

However I have found a dinky feature of strtotime that solves many of the issues. If you format your date as DD.MM.YYYY (note the periods not slashes) then strtotime recognises this as a non-US date and converts it correctly:

[php]<?php
$date = ‘8.6.2013’;
$timestamp = strtotime($date);
echo $timestamp;
?>[/php]

This will return ‘1370649600’  which represents 8 June 2013.

And if you use YYYY-MM-DD it will assume ISO 8601 format.

How you get the date in the first place is up to you. I let the the visitor uses slashes and replace them with periods before converting to a timestamp:

[php]<?php
$date = ‘8/6/2013’;
$date = str_replace(‘/’ , ‘.’ , $date);
$timestamp = strtotime($date);
echo $timestamp;
?>[/php]

So to recap:

Slashes assumes US formatted dates.

Periods assumes Non-US Dates.

Hyphen assumes ISO 8601 formatted dates.

Much simpler and dead easy to use/convert/style/process