During the PHP London conference (slides are here as usual), a number of British people were "complaining" that PHP's strtotime() and date_create() /new DateTime() functions do not understand the British date format "dd/mm/yyyy". Historically, the "English" text to date parsers in PHP only accept the illogical American format of "mm/dd/yyyy". Having seen this problem before, I recently added a new function/method to PHP's Date/Time support to address exactly this issue. From PHP 5.3 the new date_create_from_format() function and the DateTime::createFromFormat() factory method are available. As first argument they accept the expected format, and as second argument the string to parse. To parse a British date string, you would for example use:

<?php
$dt = date_create_from_format( 'd/m/Y', "02/03/2008" );
echo $dt->format( 'd/m/Y' ), "\n";
?>

In case the passed string does not match the format, the function will return false. With the also new function date_get_last_errors() method you then can request more information about which part of the string could not be passed. The following example illustrates that:

<?php
$dt = date_create_from_format( 'Y-m-d', "02/03/2008" );
if ( !$dt )
{
    $errors = date_get_last_errors();
    var_dump( $errors['errors']);
}
?>

The $errors contains a list of errors, indexed by the position in the string where the error was found. The above script would produce:

array(3) {
  [2]=>
  string(22) "Unexpected data found."
  [5]=>
  string(22) "Unexpected data found."
  [8]=>
  string(13) "Trailing data"
}

The format specifiers are mostly similar to the ones used for the date() function. Documentation on the new functions should make it into the documentation soon.