Re: strtotime - assumptions about default formatting of dates

At 10:20 PM +1000 12/24/09, Angus Mann wrote:

Hi all. I need to allow users to enter dates and times, and for a while now I've been forcing them to use javascript date/time pickers so I can be absolutely sure the formatting is correct. Some users are requesting to be able to type the entries themselves so I've decided to allow this. I'm in Australia, and the standard formatting of dates here is DD/MM/YYYY or DD-MM-YYYY I recognize this is different to what seems to happen in the US, where it is MM/DD/YYYY or MM-DD-YYYY When I process an entered date using strtotime() it seems to work fine. But of course I am concerned when dates like January 2 come up. I find that 2/1/2009 is interpreted as January 2, 2009 on my installation, which is Windows 7 with location set to Australia. But can I be sure that all installations of PHP, perhaps in different countries and on different operating systems will interpret dates the same? I can't find much mention of this question online or in the manual. Any help much appreciated. Angus

Angus: You are running into a problem that cannot be solved by allowing the user to do whatever they want. As you realize, if I enter 01-02-09 you don't know if I mean January 2, 2009 or February 1, 2009 and there is no way to figure out what I meant. The solution is simply to use the html <option> and give the user that way to enter month and day. I would set it to day-month-year and let US visitors live with it for I personally think that's a better format. Cheers and Merry Christmas. tedd -- ------- http://sperling.com http://ancientstones.com http://earthstones.com