I have been looking online for this answer and have come up empty...I am extremely tired so I thought I would give this a go....
I have a variable that has a date from a textbox
$effectiveDate=$_REQUEST['effectiveDate']; What I am trying to do is take this date and add the current time
date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime($effectiveDate)) When I echo this out I get 1969-12-31 19:00:00
Is this possible? Can someone point me in the right direction?
I found a solution to my problem....
$currentDate = date("Y-m-d"); $currentTime = date("H:i:s"); $currentDate = date("Y-m-d H:i:s", strtotime($currentDate . $currentTime)); echo $currentDate; This takes a date from variable in one format and takes the date from another variable in another format and puts them together :)
Thanks everyone for their time.....
DateTime::createFromFormat would also work but only if you have PHP 5.3 or higher...(I think)
The effectiveDate string is not in a format that strtotime recognizes, so strtotime returns false which is interpreted as 0 which causes the date to be displayed as January 1, 1970 at 00:00:00, minus your time zone offset.
$effectiveDate output ?
The result you see is caused by the entered date not being in a format recognised by strtotime. The most likely case I can think of without knowing the format you used is that you used the US order of putting the month and day the wrong way around - this confuses strtotime, because if it accepts both then it can't distinguish February 3rd and March 2nd, so it has to reject US-formatted dates.
The most reliable format for strtotime is YYYY-MM-DD HH:ii:ss, as it is unambigous.
strtotime to parse user-entered dates, then at least add some validation to make sure the user has used a sensible, unambiguous format.strtotime and then convert it back to one or more formats using date. If the entered string doesn't match one of the converted-back strings, then reject it. This would also avoid the weird handling of out-of-range month and day values.
<input type="date" placeholder="YYYY-MM-DD" /> coupled with a nicely-implemented JavaScript fallback for unsupporting browsers. This ensures you'll be dealing with an ISO-standard date format, unless the user's stuck in last millennium with an outdated browser and JavaScript turned off... but in that case a server-side message can tell them what format to use.The date is just a timestamp, it is not object-oriented and i don't like it.
You can use the DateTime object.
The object-oriented best way is:
$effectiveDate=$_REQUEST['effectiveDate']; // here you must pass the original format to pass your original string to a DateTimeObject $dateTimeObject = DateTime::createFromFormat('Y-m-d H:i:s', $effectiveDate); // here you must pass the desired format echo $dateTimeObject->format('Y-m-d H:i:s'); 
$_REQUEST['effectiveDate']in?