Hi Folk

I love the strtotime function, because I can make a date field in a form and
just tell my users to enter whatever they want and as long as it is a date,
it will work.

HOWEVER, this obviously does not work for the day/month vs month/day
scenario. That is, in New Zealand we use day/month/year, while the function
assumes it to be month/day/year.

Does anyone have a simple function that helps me close that loophole (I am
using PHP 4.4).

I copied the function below from php.net, but I dont think it will work in
all cases.

Cheers

> Nicolaas
# Returns a timestamp from a string based on the given format and default
timezone if it's ambiguous.
# %Y - year as a decimal number including the century
# %m - month as a decimal number (range 01 to 12)
# %d - day of the month as a decimal number (range 01 to 31)
# %H - hour as a decimal number using a 24-hour clock (range 00 to 23)
# %M - minute as a decimal number

function parseDate( $date, $format = "%d/%m/%Y") {
// Builds up date pattern from the given $format, keeping delimiters in
place.
if( !preg_match_all( "/%([YmdHMp])([^%])*/", $format, $formatTokens,
PREG_SET_ORDER ) ) {
return false;
}
foreach( $formatTokens as $formatToken ) {
$delimiter = preg_quote( $formatToken[2], "/" );
$datePattern .= "(.*)".$delimiter;
}

// Splits up the given $date
if( !preg_match( "/".$datePattern."/", $date, $dateTokens) ) {
return false;
}
$dateSegments = array();
for($i = 0; $i < count($formatTokens); $i++) {
$dateSegments[$formatTokens[$i][1]] = $dateTokens[$i+1];
}

// Reformats the given $date into US English date format, suitable for
strtotime()
if( $dateSegments["Y"] && $dateSegments["m"] && $dateSegments["d"] ) {
$dateReformated =
$dateSegments["Y"]."-".$dateSegments["m"]."-".$dateSegments["d"];
}
else {
return false;
}
if( $dateSegments["H"] && $dateSegments["M"] ) {
$dateReformated .= " ".$dateSegments["H"].":".$dateSegments["M"];
}

return strtotime( $dateReformated );
}