strtotime accepting invalid values

[Craig Thomson]

I'm using strtotime to validate a date/time passed in from a form but
am having some problems with it. It seems to allow invalid values,
such as "2004-04-13 21:66:13".

Does anyone know why this is? Is this a bug or a "feature"?

I'm using PHP 4.3.2.

TIA.

Craig

[ljb]

Re: strtotime accepting invalid values

crtblog@mailina tor.com wrote:[color=blue]
> I'm using strtotime to validate a date/time passed in from a form but
> am having some problems with it. It seems to allow invalid values,
> such as "2004-04-13 21:66:13".
>
> Does anyone know why this is? Is this a bug or a "feature"?
>
> I'm using PHP 4.3.2.[/color]

strtotime() isn't very useful in PHP 4 for validating dates, as you found.
It seems to try really hard to make some sense of any input, and can
produce unexpected results. There are several bug reports on it, and I
think there is a rewrite for PHP 5 to make it do more checks for invalid
dates. But I'm not sure it will ever be really 'fixed' to validate
date/time input, since it supports many input variations including relative
date/times.

For PHP 4, sometimes you can use regular expression matching to
validate date input, if you're willing to restrict the acceptable input
formats.