[drupal-devel] date conversion

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, Gordon Heydon wrote:

> Hi,
> On Mon, 2005-06-13 at 06:59 +0200, Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, Gordon Heydon wrote:
> >
> > > 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.
> >
> > 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.)
> >
> > (from my version of the php manual entry for strtotime)
> >
> > print strtotime("60 years ago");
> >
> > gives me -774821398.
>
> Well that gives me on both my ubuntu and debian linux systems both give
> me -1, It does say on the php site that it is windows and some linux
> distributions.

He, that's annoying. I tested on Debian too, and it fails. My earlier test
was on a rather ancient SuSE distribution.

> So if I use strtotime('31 Dec 1969') I get a -1, If it was giving me the
> rangi that it would say it would me ok.

http://de3.php.net/strtotime

In the comments there is a safestrtotime() function that claims to support
negative timestamps. Haven't tried it, though.

Cheers,
	Gerhard