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strtotime
(PHP 3>= 3.0.12, PHP 4 , PHP 5) strtotime --
Parse about any English textual datetime description into a Unix
timestamp
Descriptionint strtotime ( string time [, int now] )
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 GMT), relative
to the timestamp given in now, or the current time
if none is supplied. Upon failure, -1 is returned.
Because strtotime() behaves according to GNU
date syntax, have a look at the GNU manual page titled
Date Input Formats.
Described there is valid syntax for the time
parameter.
| Warning |
In PHP 5 up to 5.0.2, "now" and other relative times
are wrongly computed from today's midnight. It differs from other
versions where it is correctly computed from current time.
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Example 1. strtotime() examples
<?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";
?>
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Example 2. Checking for failure
<?php
$str = 'Not Good';
if (($timestamp = strtotime($str)) === -1) {
echo "The string ($str) is bogus";
} else {
echo "$str == " . date('l dS of F Y h:i:s A', $timestamp);
}
?>
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Note:
The valid range of a timestamp is typically from Fri, 13 Dec
1901 20:45:54 GMT to Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 GMT. (These are
the dates that correspond to the minimum and maximum values for
a 32-bit signed integer.)
Additionally, 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.
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