Re: No is_date() function?

Ken Tozier wrote:

Hi I wrote a serialization function to turn arbitrary PHP variables into Macintosh plist compatible XML but see that there is no "is_date" tester as there is for bool, object, array etc. Is there a relatively simple (and robust) way to detect if a variable is a date? For example: $person = array('name'=>'bob', 'sex'=>'male', 'date_of_birth'=> $someDateHere); Thanks for any help Ken --PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php Here is my suggestion. You COULD use strtotime() and try and have PHP see if it recognizes the input string as a date time stamp or something.

Live example http://www.cmsws.com/examples/php/is_date.php source <pre><?php function is_date($in) { return (boolean) strtotime($in); } $dates = array( 'tomorrow', 'yesterday', 'next week', 'last year', 'April 1st', 'December 23, 1999 4pm', ); foreach ( $dates AS $row ) { echo "Time is: ".date('c', strtotime($row)); echo " {$row} is "; var_dump(is_date($row)); } ?> -- Jim Lucas "Some men are born to greatness, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene V by William Shakespeare