php date format

Question

hi,

i wanna convert date 24/09/2010 in format dd/mm/yyyy to 2010-09-24 in format yyyy-mm-dd

when i tried this: date("Y-m-d",strtotime("09/24/2010")); it works. but when i tried this: date("Y-m-d",strtotime("24/09/2010")); it return as 1970-01-01

any idea why??

Answer 1

strtotime does it's best to guess what you mean when given a string, but it can't handle all date formats. In you example, it is probably thinking that you are trying to refer to the 24th month, which isn't valid, and returns 0, which date then treats as the unix epoch (the date you got).

you can get around this using the mktime() and explode() functions, like so:

$date = "24/09/2010";
$dateArr = explode("/",$date);
$timeStamp = mktime(0,0,0,$dateArr[1],$dateArr[0],$dateArr[2]);
$newFormat = date("Y-m-d",$timeStamp);

Answer 2

according to php, the valid php formats are stated here. So basically what you gave is invalid.

Alternatively, you can use mktime, date_parse_from_format or date_create_from_format

Answer 3

As you say, date("Y-m-d",strtotime("09/24/2010")) will work,because the date format--"09/24/2010"is correct, but "24/09/2010" is not the correct date format. you can find something useful here