PHP strtotime for June returns July

Question

I\'m stumped as to why the following PHP strtotime function returns \'07\' as the month number, rather than \'06\' when $monthToGet = \'June\':

$monthToGet =         


        

Answer 1

Today is 31 Jul. So a strtotime with only "June" is interpreted as 31 June => 1 July.

In fact:

echo date("Y-m-d",strtotime("January"));  // 2012-01-31
echo date("Y-m-d",strtotime("February")); // 2012-03-02

of course... only today 31 Jul 2012 :) Tomorrow all will works.

You're lucky because you found this bug just today ;)

Answer 2

TL;DR

You are right

echo date("m", strtotime("June"));
-> 07

However, this does work:

echo date("m", strtotime("1. June 2012"));
-> 06

The problem explained

Today is 31. July 2012 and since you provide only a month, the current day and current year are used to create a valid date.

See the documentation:

NOTE

The function expects to be given a string containing an 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 UTC), relative to the timestamp given in now, or the current time if now is not supplied.

Alternatives

You could use date_parse_from_format() or strptime() to achieve what you want with a slightly different approach.

(Thanks to johannes_ and johann__ for their input)

Answer 3

Fixed with :

$monthToGet = '1 '. $_GET['mon'];

But I still don't get why, since "m" is a valid date format