Using strtotime and date to add time to date

Question

I am having an incredibly hard time understanding strtotime even after reading the never ending questions on stack overflow on the subject....

date('Y-m-d',strtotime("+3 months",date('Y-m-d')))

Why does that not return 2013-10-09 (given today's date is 2013-07-09)

Instead it returns 1970-03-31 3 months after the PHP default date.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.time.php -- Date is for formatting a timestamp. If you want to get the current timestamp, use `time()`. — Ariane, Jul 10 '13 at 03:33

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 10 '13 at 03:32

3

Because the strtotime() expects the second argument to be numeric:

date('Y-m-d',strtotime("+3 months", time()))

or even

date('Y-m-d',strtotime("+3 months"))

PS: you could find it out yourself if used error_reporting level that includes E_NOTICE and checked your logs.

It's actually a good idea to have display_errors turned on on your development server with error_reporting at least of E_ALL. As a developer you want to be the first person to see your mistakes, don't you?

answered Jul 10 '13 at 03:32

zerkms

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So i'm taking string "+3 months" and adding to to time() in date('Y-m-d') format......correct? – Hydra IO Jul 10 '13 at 03:35
@Hydra IO: You're taking `time()` adding `+3 months` to it and format the result timestamp using `date` – zerkms Jul 10 '13 at 03:37
correct, btw, you can use both singular and plural for period, so "+3 month" would work as well – Nemoden Jul 10 '13 at 03:37
Thank you very much, as soon as the pesky 10 minute limit is up, I can mark as solved =D – Hydra IO Jul 10 '13 at 03:38

Using strtotime and date to add time to date

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