This one's odd because the time comes before the year, but it's the locale standard.

$ date +"%c" Sun Apr 18 18:36:57 2004

These are the only strtotime formats I already use:

strtotime ("+20 minutes") strtotime ("+3 month") strtotime ("Monday") strtotime ("2001-10-24 15:22:13")

I think it would be good to be able to parse the default timstamp and date formats for postgresql, mysql and probably oracle and mssql. I only use postgresql so I can only point you here:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/static/datatype-datetime.html

Parsing anything that a database could spit out would be great...

culley

Like culley's suggestion regarding database date formats, consider also typical

webserver log date formats. For example, for Apache's logs: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/logs.html http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/logs.html

Also, how about operating system timestamps: http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/archive/2003/09/05/54806.aspx

There may be some good clues in the GNU C Library: http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Calendar-Time.html#Calendar%20Time

Maybe some clues here in POSIX Locale: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xbd/locale.html#tag_005_003_005

Here are some additional database date and time function format references: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Date_and_time_functions.html http://otn.oracle.com/tech/blaf/specs/commonFormats.html http://www.sswug.org/searchresults.asp?keywordstofind2=date%20time

For me, the most useful things about strftime() are doing relative date math ("+2 days") ("1 sunday ago") that properly accounts for DST switches and stuff based on days of the week ("next Monday").