PHP 7.0.6 Released

    strtotime

    (PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7)

    strtotime — Parse about any English textual datetime description into a Unix timestamp

    Description

    int strtotime ( string $time [, int $now = time() ] )

    The function expects to be given a string containing an English date format and will try to parse that format into a Unix timestamp (the number of seconds since January 1 1970 00:00:00 UTC), relative to the timestamp given in now, or the current time if now is not supplied.

    Each parameter of this function uses the default time zone unless a time zone is specified in that parameter. Be careful not to use different time zones in each parameter unless that is intended. See date_default_timezone_get() on the various ways to define the default time zone.

    Parameters

    time

    A date/time string. Valid formats are explained in Date and Time Formats.

    now

    The timestamp which is used as a base for the calculation of relative dates.

    Return Values

    Returns a timestamp on success, FALSE otherwise. Previous to PHP 5.1.0, this function would return -1 on failure.

    Errors/Exceptions

    Every call to a date/time function will generate a E_NOTICE if the time zone is not valid, and/or a E_STRICT or E_WARNING message if using the system settings or the TZ environment variable. See also date_default_timezone_set()

    Changelog

    Version Description
    5.3.0 Prior to PHP 5.3.0, relative time formats supplied to the time argument of strtotime() such as this week, previous week, last week, and next week were interpreted to mean a 7 day period relative to the current date/time, rather than a week period of Monday through Sunday.
    5.3.0 Prior to PHP 5.3.0, 24:00 was not a valid format and strtotime() returned FALSE.
    5.2.7 In PHP 5 prior to 5.2.7, requesting a given occurrence of a given weekday in a month where that weekday was the first day of the month would incorrectly add one week to the returned timestamp. This has been corrected in 5.2.7 and later versions.
    5.1.0 Now returns FALSE on failure, instead of -1.
    5.1.0

    Now issues the E_STRICT and E_NOTICE time zone errors.

    5.0.2 In PHP 5 up to 5.0.2, "now" and other relative times are wrongly computed from today's midnight. This differs from other versions where it is correctly computed from current time.
    5.0.0 Microseconds began to be allowed, but they are ignored.

    Examples

    Example #1 A strtotime() example

    <?php
    echo strtotime("now"), "\n";
    echo     strtotime("10 September 2000"), "\n";
    echo     strtotime("+1 day"), "\n";
    echo     strtotime("+1 week"), "\n";
    echo     strtotime("+1 week 2 days 4 hours 2 seconds"), "\n";
    echo     strtotime("next Thursday"), "\n";
    echo     strtotime("last Monday"), "\n";
    ?>

    Example #2 Checking for failure

    <?php
    $str     = 'Not Good';

    // previous to PHP 5.1.0 you would compare with -1, instead of false
    if (($timestamp = strtotime($str)) === false) {
        echo     "The string ($str) is bogus";
    } else {
        echo     "$str == " . date('l dS \o\f F Y h:i:s A', $timestamp);
    }
    ?>

    Notes

    Note:

    If the number of the year is specified in a two digit format, the values between 00-69 are mapped to 2000-2069 and 70-99 to 1970-1999. See the notes below for possible differences on 32bit systems (possible dates might end on 2038-01-19 03:14:07).

    Note:

    The valid range of a timestamp is typically from Fri, 13 Dec 1901 20:45:54 UTC to Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 UTC. (These are the dates that correspond to the minimum and maximum values for a 32-bit signed integer.)

    Prior to PHP 5.1.0, not all platforms support negative timestamps, therefore your date range may be limited to no earlier than the Unix epoch. This means that e.g. dates prior to Jan 1, 1970 will not work on Windows, some Linux distributions, and a few other operating systems.

    For 64-bit versions of PHP, the valid range of a timestamp is effectively infinite, as 64 bits can represent approximately 293 billion years in either direction.

    Note:

    Dates in the m/d/y or d-m-y formats are disambiguated by looking at the separator between the various components: if the separator is a slash (/), then the American m/d/y is assumed; whereas if the separator is a dash (-) or a dot (.), then the European d-m-y format is assumed. If, however, the year is given in a two digit format and the separator is a dash (-, the date string is parsed as y-m-d.

    To avoid potential ambiguity, it's best to use ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) dates or DateTime::createFromFormat() when possible.

    Note:

    Using this function for mathematical operations is not advisable. It is better to use DateTime::add() and DateTime::sub() in PHP 5.3 and later, or DateTime::modify() in PHP 5.2.

    See Also

    User Contributed Notes

    sam at frontiermedia dot net dot au
    5 years ago
    I've had a little trouble with this function in the past because (as some people have pointed out) you can't really set a locale for strtotime. If you're American, you see 11/12/10 and think "12 November, 2010". If you're Australian (or European), you think it's 11 December, 2010. If you're a sysadmin who reads in ISO, it looks like 10th December 2011.

    The best way to compensate for this is by modifying your joining characters. Forward slash (/) signifies American M/D/Y formatting, a dash (-) signifies European D-M-Y and a period (.) signifies ISO Y.M.D.

    Observe:

    <?php
    echo date("jS F, Y", strtotime("11.12.10"));
    // outputs 10th December, 2011

    echo date("jS F, Y", strtotime("11/12/10"));
    // outputs 12th November, 2010

    echo date("jS F, Y", strtotime("11-12-10"));
    // outputs 11th December, 2010 
    ?>

    Hope this helps someone!
    Stefan Kunstmann
    5 years ago
    UK dates (eg. 27/05/1990) won't work with strotime, even with timezone properly set.

    /*
    However, if you just replace "/" with "-" it will work fine.
    <?php
    $timestamp     = strtotime(str_replace('/', '-', '27/05/1990'));
    ?>
    */

    [red., derick]: What you instead should do is:

    <?php
    $date     = date_create_from_format('d/m/y', '27/05/1990');
    ?>

    That does not make it a timestamp, but a DateTime object, which is much more versatile instead.
    cristinawithout
    4 years ago
    WARNING when using "next month", "last month", "+1 month",  "-1 month" or any combination of +/-X months. It will give non-intuitive results on Jan 30th and 31st.

    As described at : http://derickrethans.nl/obtaining-the-next-month-in-php.html

    <?php
    $d     = new DateTime( '2010-01-31' );
    $d->modify( 'next month' );
    echo     $d->format( 'F' ), "\n";
    ?>

    In the above, using "next month" on January 31 will output "March" even though you might want it to output "February". ("+1 month" will give the same result. "last month", "-1 month" are similarly affected, but the results would be seen at beginning of March.)

    The way to get what people would generally be looking for when they say "next month" even on Jan 30 and Jan 31 is to use "first day of next month":

    <?php
    $d     = new DateTime( '2010-01-08' );
    $d->modify( 'first day of next month' );
    echo     $d->format( 'F' ), "\n";
    ?>

    <?php
    $d     = new DateTime( '2010-01-08' );
    $d->modify( 'first day of +1 month' );
    echo     $d->format( 'F' ), "\n";
    ?>
    michal dot kocarek at brainbox dot cz
    6 years ago
    strtotime() also returns time by year and weeknumber. (I use PHP 5.2.8, PHP 4 does not support it.) Queries can be in two forms:
    - "yyyyWww", where yyyy is 4-digit year, W is literal and ww is 2-digit weeknumber. Returns timestamp for first day of week (for me Monday)
    - "yyyy-Www-d", where yyyy is 4-digit year, W is literal, ww is 2-digit weeknumber and dd is day of week (1 for Monday, 7 for Sunday)

    <?php
    // Get timestamp of 32nd week in 2009.
    strtotime('2009W32'); // returns timestamp for Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00
    // Weeknumbers < 10 must be padded with zero:
    strtotime('2009W01'); // returns timestamp for Mon, 29 Dec 2008 00:00:00
    // strtotime('2009W1'); // error! returns false

    // See timestamp for Tuesday in 5th week of 2008
    strtotime('2008-W05-2'); // returns timestamp for Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:00:00
    ?>

    Weeknumbers are (probably) computed according to ISO-8601 specification, so doing date('W') on given timestamps should return passed weeknumber.
    kumar AT swatantra.info Swatantra Kumar
    3 years ago
    The "+1 month" issue with strtotime
    ===================================
    As noted in several blogs, strtotime() solves the "+1 month" ("next month") issue on days that do not exist in the subsequent month differently than other implementations like for example MySQL.

    <?php
    echo date( "Y-m-d", strtotime( "2009-01-31 +1 month" ) ); // PHP:  2009-03-03
    echo date( "Y-m-d", strtotime( "2009-01-31 +2 month" ) ); // PHP:  2009-03-31
    ?>

    <?php
    SELECT DATE_ADD    ( '2009-01-31', INTERVAL 1 MONTH ); // MySQL:  2009-02-28
    ?>
    me at will morgan dot co dot you kay
    3 years ago
    For negative UNIX timestamps, strtotime seems to return the literal you passed in, or it may try to deduct the number of seconds from today's date.

    To work around this behaviour, it appears that the same behaviour as described in the DateTime classes applies:

    http://php.net/manual/en/datetime.construct.php

    Specifically this line here (in the EN manual):

    > The $timezone parameter and the current timezone are ignored when the $time parameter either is a UNIX timestamp (e.g. @946684800) or specifies a timezone (e.g. 2010-01-28T15:00:00+02:00).

    Therefore strtotime('@-1000') returns 1000 seconds before the epoch.

    Hope this helps.
    x at xero dot nu
    5 years ago
    strtotime is awesome for converting dates.
    in this example i will make an RSS date, an
    ATOM date, then convert them to a human
    readable m/d/Y dates.

    <?php
    $rss     = date("r");
    $atom = date("c");
    $human1 = date('m/d/Y', strtotime($rss));
    $human2 = date('m/d/Y', strtotime($atom));

    echo     $rss."<br />".$atom."<br />".$human1."<br />".$human2;
    ?>
    kyle at frozenonline dot com
    12 years ago
    I was having trouble parsing Apache log files that consisted of a time entry (denoted by %t for Apache configuration). An example Apache-date looks like: [21/Dec/2003:00:52:39 -0500]

    Apache claims this to be a 'standard english format' time. strtotime() feels otherwise.

    I came up with this function to assist in parsing this peculiar format.

    <?php
    function from_apachedate($date)
    {
            list(    $d, $M, $y, $h, $m, $s, $z) = sscanf($date, "[%2d/%3s/%4d:%2d:%2d:%2d %5s]");
            return     strtotime("$d $M $y $h:$m:$s $z");
    }
    ?>

    Hope it helps anyone else seeking such a conversion.
    php at davidstockton dot com
    6 years ago
    Adding a note to an already long page:

    Try to be as specific as you can with the string you pass in.  For example

    <?php
    echo date('F', strtotime('February'));
    ?>

    is not specific enough.  Depending on the day of the month, you may get a different response.  For a non-leap year, you'll get March if the _current day of the month_ is the 29th, 30th or 31st.  If it's a leap year, you'll get March on the 30th or 31st of the month.  The same thing will happen on the 31st of any month when you pass in the name of any month with less than 31 days.  This happens because the strtotime() function will fill in missing parts from the current day.

    Assuming today is July 31, the timestamp returned by strtotime('February') will ultimately be seen as February 31 (non-existant obviously), which then is interpreted as March 3, thus giving a month name of March.

    Interestingly, adding the year or the day will give you back the expected month.
    joe at strtotime dot co dot uk
    1 year ago
    A useful testing tool for strtotime() and unix timestamp conversion:
    http://strtotime.co.uk/
    Killermonk
    6 years ago
    You are not restricted to the same date ranges when running PHP on a 64-bit machine. This is because you are using 64-bit integers instead of 32-bit integers (at least if your OS is smart enough to use 64-bit integers in a 64-bit OS)

    The following code will produce difference output in 32 and 64 bit environments.

    var_dump(strtotime('1000-01-30'));

    32-bit PHP: bool(false)
    64-bit PHP: int(-30607689600)

    This is true for php 5.2.* and 5.3

    Also, note that the anything about the year 10000 is not supported. It appears to use only the last digit in the year field. As such, the year 10000 is interpretted as the year 2000; 10086 as 2006, 13867 as 2007, etc
    Travis Pulley
    6 years ago
    Be aware that if you are running 5.2.8, there is a memory leak with this function and it could cost someone valuable time finding out what the problem was. Per usual, running the latest (minor) version tends to be a good idea.

    See here: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=46889
    Anonymous
    6 years ago
    This function DOES NOT work from left-to-right as one would think. This function parses the string as a whole, then applies the intervals by size (year, month, ...). Take the following example:

    <?php
    $Date     = strtotime('2011-02-22'); // February 22nd, 2011. 28 days in this month, 29 next year.
    echo date('n/j/Y', strtotime('+1 year, +7 days', $Date)); // add 1 year and 7 days. prints 2/29/2012
    echo "<br />";
    echo     date('n/j/Y', strtotime('+7 days, +1 year', $Date)); // add 7 days and 1 year, but this also prints 2/29/2012
    echo "<br />";
    echo     date('n/j/Y', strtotime('+1 year', strtotime('+7 days', $Date))); // this prints 3/1/2012, what the 2nd would do if it was left-to-right
    ?>
    Annomoys
    4 years ago
    Strtotime() can be used to loop through date range.
    as follows

    <?php
    $start     = strtotime('2009-02-01');
    $end = strtotime('2009-03-10');
    $date = $start;
    while(    $date < $end)
    {

           //write your code here
           $date = strtotime("+1 day", $date);(counter)

    }

    ?>
    chris at teamsiems dot com
    6 years ago
    It took me a while to notice that strtotime starts searching from just after midnight of the first day of the month. So, if the month starts on the day you search for, the first day of the search is actually the next occurrence of the day.

    In my case, when I look for first Tuesday of the current month, I need to include a check to see if the month starts on a Tuesday.

    <?php
    if (date("l", strtotime("$thisMonth $thisYear"))=='Tuesday') {
      echo     "<p>This month starts on a Tuesday. Use \"$thisMonth $thisYear\" to check for first Tuesday.</p>\n";
    } else {
      echo     "<p>This month does not start on a Tuesday. Use \"first tuesday $thisMonth $thisYear\" to check for first Tuesday.</p>\n";
    }
    ?>
    Michael Muryn (MickoZ)
    4 years ago
    [red.: This is a bug, and should be fixed. I have file an issue]

    This comment apply to PHP5+

    We can now do thing like this with strtotime:
    <?php
    $weekMondayTime     = strtotime('Monday this week');
    ?>
    However this works based on a week starting Sunday.  I do not know if we can tweak this PHP behavior, anyone know?

    If you want the timestamp of the start of the ISO Week (i.e. on Monday) as defined by ISO 8601, you can use this one liner:
    <?php
    $isoWeekStartTime     = strtotime(date('o-\\WW')); // {isoYear}-W{isoWeekNumber}
    ?>

    You can also find out the start of week of any time and format it into an ISO date with another one liner like this:
    <?php
    $isoWeekStartDate     = date('Y-m-d', strtotime(date('o-\\WW', $time)));
    ?>

    For more information about ISO-8601 and ISO week date:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Week_dates
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date
    marcodemaio at vanylla dot it
    5 years ago
    NOTE: strtotime returns different values when the Week day does not match the date.

    Simple example:

    <?php
    $d1     = strtotime("26 Oct 0010 12:00:00 +0100");
    $d2 = strtotime("Tue, 26 Oct 0010 12:00:00 +0100");
    $d3 = strtotime("Sun, 26 Oct 0010 12:00:00 +0100"); //But Oct 26 is a Tuesday, NOT a Sunday.

    echo $d1; //ok 1288090800 that is "26 Ott 2010 - 11:00";
    echo $d2; //ok 1288090800 that is "26 Ott 2010 - 11:00";
    echo $d3; //WRONG! 1288522800 that is "31 Ott 2010 - 11:00";
    ?>

    Sometime I found RSS feeds that contains week days that do not match the date.

    A possible solution is to remove useless week day before passing the date string into strtotime, example:

    <?php
       $date_string     = "Sun, 26 Oct 0010 12:00:00 +0100";
       if( (    $comma_pos = strpos($date_string, ',')) !== FALSE )
              $date_string = substr($date_string, $comma_pos + 1);
           $d3 = strtotime($date_string);
    ?>
    nyctimus at yahoo dot com
    5 years ago
    strtotime() produces different output on 32 and 64 bit systems running PHP 5.3.3 (as mentioned previously).  This affects the "zero date" ("0000-00-00 00:00:00") as well as dates outside the traditional 32 date range.

    strtotime("0000-00-00 00:00:00") returns FALSE on a 32 bit system.
    strtotime("0000-00-00 00:00:00") returns -62169955200 on a 64 bit system.
    katylava at gmail dot com
    6 years ago
    You should play around with strtotime() before you decide what it can't do.  for example:

    <?php

    # on 2/8/2010
    date('m/d/y', strtotime('first day')); # 02/01/10
    date('m/d/y', strtotime('last day')); # 02/28/10
    date('m/d/y', strtotime('last day next month')); # 03/31/10
    date('m/d/y', strtotime('last day last month')); # 01/31/10
    date('m/d/y', strtotime('2009-12 last day')); # 12/31/09 - this doesn't work if you reverse the order of the year and month
    date('m/d/y', strtotime('2009-03 last day')); # 03/31/09
    date('m/d/y', strtotime('2009-03')); # 03/01/09
    date('m/d/y', strtotime('last day of march 2009')); # 03/31/09
    date('m/d/y', strtotime('last day of march')); # 03/31/10
    ?>
    andrew dot myers at civicwifi dot com
    8 years ago
    Here is a list of differences between PHP 4 and PHP 5 that I have found
    (specifically PHP 4.4.2 and PHP 5.2.3).

    <?php

    $ts_from_nothing     = strtotime();
    var_dump($ts_from_nothing);
    // PHP 5
    //    bool(false)
    //    WARNING: Wrong parameter count...
    // PHP 4
    //    NULL
    //    WARNING: Wrong parameter count...

    // remember that unassigned variables evaluate to NULL
    $ts_from_null = strtotime($null);
    var_dump($ts_from_null)...
    // PHP 5
    //    bool(false)
    //    throws a NOTICE: Undefined variable
    // PHP 4
    //    current time
    //    NOTICE: Undefined variable $null...
    //    NOTICE: Called with empty time parameter...

    $ts_from_empty = strtotime("");
    var_dump($ts_from_empty);
    // PHP 5
    //    bool(false)
    // PHP 4
    //    current time
    //    NOTICE: Called with empty time parameter

    $ts_from_bogus = strtotime("not a date");
    var_dump($ts_from_bogus);
    // PHP 5
    //    bool(false)
    // PHP 4
    //    -1

    ?>
    trurl at mcbyte dot net
    1 month ago
    Be carefull with weekdays names
    <?php echo date('r',strtotime("Thursday 01:15")), "\n"; ?>
    returns something like "Thu, 17 Mar 2016 01:15:00 +0200"
    but
    <?php echo date('r',strtotime("Thursdays 01:15")), "\n"; ?>
    returns "Thu, 17 Mar 2016 09:15:00 +0200".

    So "s" at end mean "+8 hours".
    gabriel dot rempel at gmail dot com
    1 year ago
    // small function auto detect to convert date

    function formatDate($date)
    {
        if (strpos($date,'/') !== false) :
            $date = str_replace('/', '-', $date);
            $date = date('Y-m-d h:i:s', strtotime($date));
        else :
            $date = date('d-m-Y h:i:s', strtotime($date));
            $date = str_replace('-', '/', $date);
        endif;
        return $date;
    }
    peixoto at live dot com
    2 years ago
    <?php strtotime('-5 weeks monday') ?> returns the monday of 5 weeks ago.
    Christian L.
    2 years ago
    To get the start of the current week this code works fine when the week starts on Sundays.

    <?php strtotime('this Monday'); ?>

    To get the timestamp of the start of a week starting on Mondays (as defined by ISO 8601) this shoud do the trick.

    <?php strtotime('next Monday -1 week'); ?>
    a dot fruchi at bit-runners dot com
    5 years ago
    If you want to confront a date stored into mysql as a date field (not a datetime) and a date specified by a literal string, be sure to add "midnight" to the literal string, otherwise they won't match:

    <?php
    //I.E.: today is 17/02/2011

    echo strtotime('2011-01-01'); //1293836400
    echo strtotime('first day of last month'); //1293888128 Note: it's different from the previous one, since it computes also the seconds passed from midnight!!! So this one is always greater than simple '2011-01-01'
    echo strtotime('midnight first day of last monty');//1293836400 Note: it's the same as '2011-01-01'

    ?>
    Tim
    5 years ago
    Unlike "yesterday 14:00", "14:00 yesterday" will return 00:00 of yesterday.
    kooshal at live dot com
    6 years ago
    when using PHP 5.3, you must use date_default_timezone_set() to set the time zone otherwise you will get warning similar to this (if you have display_errors=On)—

    Warning: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Asia/Dubai' for '4.0/no DST' instead in path/to/php/script.php
    on line ##

    Example:
    date_default_timezone_set('Indian/Mauritius');

    For a list of supported timezones in PHP, see http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php
    viper7 at viper-7 dot com
    6 years ago
    Observed date formats that strtotime expects, it can be quite confusing, so hopefully this makes things a little clearer for some.

    mm/dd/yyyy - 02/01/2003  - strtotime() returns : 1st February 2003
    mm/dd/yy   - 02/01/03    - strtotime() returns : 1st February 2003
    yyyy/mm/dd  - 2003/02/01 - strtotime() returns : 1st February 2003
    dd-mm-yyyy - 01-02-2003  - strtotime() returns : 1st February 2003
    yy-mm-dd   - 03-02-01    - strtotime() returns : 1st February 2003
    yyyy-mm-dd - 2003-02-01  - strtotime() returns : 1st February 2003
    info at jesperveldhuizen dot com
    3 years ago
    There is a change in the strtotime function...

    <?php

    echo date('Y', strtotime('0000-00-00 00:00:00'));

    /*
    PHP 5.3.3
    returns: -0001

    PHP 5.2.10
    returns: 1970
    */

    ?>
    Anonymous
    2 years ago
    Be aware that you cannot rely on this function alone to validate a date, as it will accept insane dates like the 31st of February.

    Also, the '... week' functionality by itself may not do what you expect. If used on a Sunday, 'next week' will not return a timestamp of the next Monday, but of the Monday after that. Similarly, a timestamp for the Monday of the current week is returned when 'previous/last week' is used and 'this week' returns a stamp of the Monday of the next week (i.e. the following day). This is not the 'week starts on Sunday' effect, as that would mean all the timestamps returned would have to be on a Sunday and none of them are.
    jaymin at gmx dot net
    7 years ago
    strtotime() seems to treat dates delimited by slashes as m/d/y and dates delimited by dashes are treated as d-m-y.

    <?php
    print date('Y-m-d', strtotime("06/08/2008"));
    ?>

    returns 2008-06-08

    while

    <?php
    print date('Y-m-d', strtotime("06-08-2008"));
    ?>

    returns 2008-08-06

    Using PHP 5.2.6
    fuhrysteve at gmail dot com
    7 years ago
    Here's a hack to make this work for MS SQL's datetime junk, since strtotime() has issues with fractional seconds.

    <?php

    $MSSQLdatetime     = "Feb  7 2009 09:48:06:697PM";
    $newDatetime = preg_replace('/:[0-9][0-9][0-9]/','',$MSSQLdatetime);
    $time = strtotime($newDatetime);
    echo     $time."\n";

    ?>
    Andrey Kabakchiev
    9 months ago
    Actually the top-voted comment from 'sam at frontiermedia dot net dot au' is not quite right, as is the documentation Note. The correct assumptions made by strtotime() are:

    Forward slashes (/) assume US formatted dates, e.g mm/dd/yy

    Periods (.) assume Non-US dates, e.g dd.mm.yy

    Hypens (-) assume ISO 8601 (ATOM) formatted dates, e.g yy-mm-dd
    silveraxe at gmail dot com
    4 years ago
    This date is interpreted as American date (MM/DD/YYYY):
    $date = "06/10/2011 14:28"; // Oct 10, 2011

    This date is interpreted as European date (DD/MM/YYYY):
    $otherDate = "06-10-2011 14:28"; // Jun 10, 2011

    That's why you see those differences.
    sgutauckis
    9 years ago
    The following might produce something different than you might expect:
    <?php
            echo date('l, F jS Y', strtotime("third wednesday", strtotime("2006-11-01"))) . "<br>";
        echo     date('l, F jS Y', strtotime("third sunday", strtotime("2006-01-01")));
    ?>
    Produces:
    Wednesday, November 22nd 2006
    Sunday, January 22nd 2006

    The problem stems from strtotime when the requested day falls on the date passed to strtotime. If you look at your calendar you will see that they should return:

    Wednesday, November 15th 2006
    Sunday, January 15th 2006

    Because the date falls on the day requested it skips that day.
    Peter
    7 years ago
    If you look for function to convert date from RSS pubDate, always make sure to check correct input format, found that for date("r") or "D, d M o G:i:s T" strtotime may return wrong result.
    Leon F.
    6 years ago
    I needed to generate timestamps for specific days of the week in a month (e.g. the 2nd wednesday or the 3rd friday).  After messing about with different syntax, I found this works pretty consistently:

    <?php
    strtotime    ('+0 week sun nov 2009'); // first sunday in nov 2009
    strtotime('+1 week sun nov 2009'); // second sunday
    strtotime('-1 week sun nov 2009'); // last sunday in oct 2009
    ?>

    This is helping me considerably in parsing ical spec's RRULE sets for example.
    glilimith
    1 year ago
    0s or 00s for day or month will wrap around to the previous month or year (respectively)

    for example,
    <?php
    echo date('Y-m-d',strtotime('2000-04-00')); // '2000-03-31'
    echo date('Y-m-d',strtotime('2000-00-04')); // '1999-12-04'
    echo date('Y-m-d',strtotime('2000-00-00')); // '1999-11-30'
    echo date('Y-m-d',strtotime('0000-00-00')); // '-0001-11-30'
    CEO at CarPool2Camp dot org
    7 years ago
    Another way to get the last day of a given month is to use date('t');
    darylblake at gmail dot com
    4 years ago
    I was doing work with cisco phone systems, and thy record their times as NTP Format.

    strtotime() doesnt process the whole NTP timestamp, off the bat, so if you want a quick function to work I bashed this together pretty quickly, there are probably more efficent ways of processing this, but it gets the job done. Enjoy.

    [code]
    <?php

    //Note: I ran this in PHP 5.3.x
    function NTPtoUnixtime($ntptime)
    {
            $explodedNTPtime = explode(" ", $ntptime,2);
            $startOfDay = strtotime("Today");
            $timeThroughDay = strtotime($explodedNTPtime[0]) - $startOfDay ;
        return     strtotime($explodedNTPtime[1])+$timeThroughDay;
    }

    $ntpTime = "09:49:22.897 NZDT Mon Feb 20 2012"; //NTP time to convert.

    echo NTPtoUnixtime($ntpTime);

    //produces: 1329684562
    // Which equates to: Mon 20 Feb 2012 09:49:22 NZDT GMT+13
    ?>

    [/code]
    Alex Austin
    6 years ago
    Seems in PHP5 there are new values that can be passed to the function:

    <?php
    echo time();
    echo     '<br>';
    echo     strtotime('noon');
    echo     '<br>';
    echo     strtotime('midnight');
    echo     '<br>';
    echo     strtotime('10am');
    echo     '<br>';
    echo     strtotime('2pm');
    ?>
    Mauro
    9 months ago
    you can also use:

    <?php
    strtotime    ("+1 minute")
    ?>
     this is useful if used with the function  time_sleep_until()
    Anonymous
    2 years ago
    <?php
    # strtotime() function with param "now" work only with UTC
    # time zone (GMT) Grinvich, but param "midnight" work with
    # local time zone

    date_default_timezone_set("Europe/Kiev");
    echo     "Kiev:".strtotime("now");
    echo     "<br><br>";

    date_default_timezone_set("America/New_York");
    echo     "New-York:".strtotime("now");
    echo     "<br><br>";
    date_default_timezone_set("UTC");
    echo     "UTC:".strtotime("now");
    echo     "<br>==========================<br>";

    date_default_timezone_set("Europe/Kiev");
    echo     "Kiev:".strtotime("midnight");
    echo     "<br><br>";

    date_default_timezone_set("America/New_York");
    echo     "New-York:".strtotime("midnight");
    echo     "<br><br>";
    date_default_timezone_set("UTC");
    echo     "UTC:".strtotime("midnight");
    echo     "<br><br>";
    ?>

    result:
    Kiev:1394781415

    New-York:1394781415

    UTC:1394781415
    ==========================
    Kiev:1394748000

    New-York:1394769600

    UTC:1394755200
    me at ramynasr dot com
    6 months ago
    There were a lot of comments about the right date format to parse the standard apache log time properly.

    <?php
    $string     = '[26/Oct/2015:15:42:26 -0500]';

    $format = '[d/M/Y:H:i:s T]';

    $date  = DateTime::createFromFormat($format, $string);
    ?>
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