(PHP 3 >= 3.0.12, PHP 4, PHP 5)
strtotime -- Parse about any English textual datetime description into a Unix timestampThe function expects to be given a string containing a US 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.
This function will use the TZ environment variable (if available) to calculate the timestamp. Since PHP 5.1.0 there are easier ways to define the timezone that is used across all date/time functions. That process is explained in the date_default_timezone_get() function page.
Note: If the number of the year is specified in a two digit format, the values between 0-69 are mapped to 2000-2069 and 70-100 to 1970-2000.
The string to parse, according to the GNU Date Input Formats syntax. Before PHP 5.0, microseconds weren't allowed in the time, since PHP 5.0 they are allowed but ignored.
The timestamp used to calculate the returned value.
Returns a timestamp on success, FALSE otherwise. Previous to PHP 5.1.0, this function would return -1 on failure.
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. |
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. PHP 5.1.0 and newer versions overcome this limitation though.