Convert ambigious date string to unix timestamp in PHP

Question

if you have an ambiguous date like "05/04/2014" (which is dd/mm/yyyy but just by looking at it could be month first too), how can you convert it to a PHP unix timestamp?

It looks like https://php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php is close to what I want, but there is no way to specify the date format as being day first?

Answer 1

xdazz's answer is almost correct, but you will absorb the current time if you do that without removing it explicitly.

<?
$dt = DateTime::createFromFormat("m/d/Y", "05/04/2014");
$dt->setTime(0,0,0); # remove current time.
echo $dt->getTimestamp();
?>

In understand why we need line 2, replace line 3 with

  var_dump($dt);

Then, delete line 2, and observe that there is a time in addition to the desired date.

Answer 2

you can use PHP fucntion date_format:

$date = date_create('2000-01-01');
echo date_format($date, 'm-d-Y H:i:s');

http://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.format.php

Answer 3

See DateTime::createFromFormat and DateTime::getTimestamp:

$date = DateTime::createFromFormat('d/m/Y', '05/04/2014');
echo $date->getTimestamp();