What date formats does PHP strtotime () support?

Question

I really like the PHP function strtotime (), but the user manual does not give a complete description of the supported date formats. He gives only a few examples, such as September 10, 2000, +1 Week 2 Days 4 Hours 2 Seconds, and Next Thursday.

Where can I find a full description?

Answer 1

I cannot find anything official, but I saw a tutorial that says strtotime () uses GNU data input formats. These are described in detail in the GNU manual .

One mismatch that I notice is that the “next” is not as described in the GNU manual. Using strtotime (), "next Thursday" will give you the same result as "Thursday" if today is not Thursday.

If today is Thursday, then

• strtotime ("Thursday") == strtotime ("today")
• strtotime ("next Thursday") == strtotime ("today + 7 days")

If today is not Thursday, then

• strtotime ("Thursday") == strtotime ("next Thursday")

I am using PHP 5.2.6.

Update:

I think the user guide has been updated since I posted this, otherwise I was blind. It now contains a link to the "Date and Time Formats" section , which includes the relative formats section.

Answer 2

You can start tracking what it does by looking at the following C code:

http://cvs.php.net/viewvc.cgi/php-src/ext/date/php_date.c

Search for PHP_FUNCTION (strtotime)

This is also the main regular expression parsing:

http://cvs.php.net/viewvc.cgi/php-src/ext/date/lib/parse_date.re

Good luck.

Answer 3

In my experience, strtotime () can accept anything even remotely like a date. The best way to find out its boundaries is to create a test script and plug in the values ​​and see what it does and doesn't work.

$input = "Apr 10th"; print(date('Ym-d', strtotime($input))); 

Just keep changing the $ input variable and watch the results.

Answer 4

Basically, everything that date can create strtotime will be parsed. With one exception, he has issues with non-American-style formatting. Therefore, save the format of the month in the format "Day-Year-Year".