How to convert date to timestamp in PHP?

Question

How do I get timestamp from e.g. 22-09-2008?

Answer 1

If you know the format use strptime because strtotime does a guess for the format, which might not always be correct. Since strptime is not implemented in Windows there is a custom function

• http://nl3.php.net/manual/en/function.strptime.php#86572

Remember that the returnvalue tm_year is from 1900! and tm_month is 0-11

Example:

$a = strptime('22-09-2008', '%d-%m-%Y');
$timestamp = mktime(0, 0, 0, $a['tm_mon']+1, $a['tm_mday'], $a['tm_year']+1900)

Answer 2

If you want to know for sure whether a date gets parsed into something you expect, you can use DateTime::createFromFormat():

$d = DateTime::createFromFormat('d-m-Y', '22-09-2008');
if ($d === false) {
    die("Woah, that date doesn't look right!");
}
echo $d->format('Y-m-d'), PHP_EOL;
// prints 2008-09-22

It's obvious in this case, but e.g. 03-04-2008 could be 3rd of April or 4th of March depending on where you come from :)

Answer 3

Please be careful about time/zone if you set it to save dates in database, as I got an issue when I compared dates from mysql that converted to timestamp using strtotime. you must use exactly same time/zone before converting date to timestamp otherwise, strtotime() will use default server timezone.

Please see this example: https://3v4l.org/BRlmV

function getthistime($type, $modify = null) {
    $now = new DateTime(null, new DateTimeZone('Asia/Baghdad'));
    if($modify) {
        $now->modify($modify);
    }
    if(!isset($type) || $type == 'datetime') {
        return $now->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');
    }
    if($type == 'time') {
        return $now->format('H:i:s');
    }
    if($type == 'timestamp') {
        return $now->getTimestamp();
    }
}
function timestampfromdate($date) {
    return DateTime::createFromFormat('Y-m-d H:i:s', $date, new DateTimeZone('Asia/Baghdad'))->getTimestamp();
}

echo getthistime('timestamp')."--".
    timestampfromdate(getthistime('datetime'))."--".
    strtotime(getthistime('datetime'));

//getthistime('timestamp') == timestampfromdate(getthistime('datetime')) (true)
//getthistime('timestamp') == strtotime(getthistime('datetime')) (false)

Answer 4

$time = '22-09-2008';
echo strtotime($time);

Answer 5

Here is a very simple and effective solution using the split and mtime functions:

$date="30/07/2010 13:24"; //Date example
list($day, $month, $year, $hour, $minute) = split('[/ :]', $date); 

//The variables should be arranged according to your date format and so the separators
$timestamp = mktime($hour, $minute, 0, $month, $day, $year);
echo date("r", $timestamp);

It worked like a charm for me.

Answer 6

Use PHP function strtotime()

echo strtotime('2019/06/06');

date — Format a local time/date