I was wondering if anyone knows of a decent method of converting dates from text to a time.
I did look at strtotime() but it will not convert anything before Jan 1, 1970 which is a problem since it is going to be used for a date of birth field, and some people will be over 35.
Is there is improved strtotime() that will convert to anything to a time.
As Killes has pointed out, negative timestamps are a problem on Windows (and so I've heard, on some of the rarer Unix variants too). This is why profile.module has its own routines for handling date fields (as birthdays are a common use case). The day, month and year are stored separately (well, as a serialized triple). The downside is that non-existant dates like "31 February" can be entered. Without more information there's not much to say... but converting a string representation of a birthday to a day/month/year pair is quite simple as long as the format is not ambiguous (e.g. d/m/y vs m/d/y). Perhaps you could try something in that direction. Steven