New way of defining timestamp in PHP 5.3?

Question

Is there a new approach in PHP 5.3 to define timestamp?

this strtotime('0000-00-00');

will return 0 date(01/01/1970) in PHP prior 5.3 and -62169984000 in PHP 5.3. And a date like 30/11/-0001 !!

But I could not find any explanations about that in the documentation. Any idea was that changed or I am missing something?

Why do you need to do this? What sort of a date is "0000-00-00"? — Lightness Races in Orbit, Sep 01 '11 at 15:59
I'm not surprised that an invalid date returns unexpected values. What exactly are you trying to do? — JJJ, Sep 01 '11 at 16:00
@Juhana: Well, `strtotime('2011-09-00')` works by "rounding". Maybe he was expecting the last day of the year -1. Of course, strictly speaking, there was no year `0`. — Lightness Races in Orbit, Sep 01 '11 at 16:01
Well I have that in a code where I actually receive 0000-00-00. Anyway I will put a validation for a correct date. Thanks everyone. — Yasen Zhelev, Sep 01 '11 at 16:08

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

Explanation is here: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=46597

To Quote:

Sure, but strtotime() has long handled invalid month and day values the same way as mktime() by effectively "rounding" them into valid values: the 0th day of the month becomes the last day of the previous month, the 0th month is the last month of the previous year, and so on. Given that interpretation, 0000-00-00 fairly obviously becomes the last day of November in the year -1 (better known as 2 BCE).

There's no chance that behaviour is going to be changed now: checkdate() is a much better way of sniffing out invalid dates anyway, and it would be a potentially nasty backward compatibility break for people relying on this behaviour in strtotime().

New way of defining timestamp in PHP 5.3?

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