Date converted wrongly

Question

When i run the following code

echo date('l jS \of F Y', strtotime('22/08/2018'));

the output is

Thursday 1st of January 1970

Any ideas why?

Answer 1

It is to do with the difference between US an European date formats.

With slashes strtotime reads MM/DD/YY with hyphens it reads DD-MM-YY

Replacing the slashes with dashes will tell it to use the correct format.

echo date('l jS \of F Y', strtotime('22-08-2018'));

Will print Wednesday 22nd of August 2018

...Forward slash (/) signifies American M/D/Y formatting, a dash (-) signifies European D-M-Y and a period (.) signifies ISO Y.M.D.

From the most up voted User Contributed Notes on: https://secure.php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php

Answer 2

The reason you get that output is because strtotime can't parse the date.
If you look in the manual it has a list of what date formats that can be parsed.

If you must use that date format you can use date_create_from_format to parse it.

$datetime = date_create_from_format ( "d/m/Y" , $dateString);

This returns a DateTime object that you can manipulate as you wish.
Example:

$dateString = '22/08/2018';
$datetime = date_create_from_format ( "d/m/Y" , $dateString);

echo date_format ( $datetime , 'l jS \of F Y' );

Will output:

Wednesday 22nd of August 2018

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