On the importance of reading the docs - PHP's date_parse errors

Mon, 28 May 2018 09:01:25 +0000

It’s important to read the documentation, and then read it again once or twice. PHP’s date_parse function parses a datetime string and returns an “array with information about the parsed date on success or FALSE on failure.” This makes it tempting to use the function something like:

$datetime = date_parse($datetime_string);
if ( $datetime === FALSE ) {
# Failure - deal with the bad $datetime_string
}
else {
# Success - use the $datetime
}

However in this case failure means the the date_parse function has failed to work at a fairly fundamental level and reading the docs further you find “In case the date format has an error, the element ’errors’ will contains the error messages.” And indeed:

PHP on Brad's Blog

On the importance of reading the docs - PHP's date_parse errors