Check if variable is a valid date with PHP

Question

I am working on a script that will import some data from a CSV file. As I am doing this I want to be able to check a variable to see if it is a valid date string. I have seen several ways to check if a sting is a date, but most of them require you to now the format. I will not know the format that the date will in. right now I am using strtotime(), but this fails to easily ``` $field ="May"; if(strtotime($field)){ echo "This is a date"; } ``` In this case, "May" was the persons first name, and not a date at all. Can any one recommend more reliable function? Edit based on questions from some of you. For a variable to pass as a "date" in my case, it would need to be specific to a day/month/year, so just "May" would be to vague to count. Based on that and Pauls good point below we can also test to see if the string contains a number, such as ``` $field ="May"; if(strtotime($field) && 1 === preg_match('~[0-9]~', $field)){ echo "This is a date"; }else{ echo "Nope not a date"; } ``` This se…

Accepted Answer

Use date_parse and check the values of the returned array

```
$date = date_parse("May")

// ["year"] == FALSE
// ["month"] == 5
// ["day"] == FALSE
```

You can also pass those into checkdate.

```
$date = date_parse($someString);
if ($date["error_count"] == 0 && checkdate($date["month"], $date["day"], $date["year"]))
    echo "Valid date";
else
    echo "Invalid date";
```

Check if variable is a valid date with PHP

Solution

Problem