strtotime() not converting string to timestamp

Question

I am trying to convert a string to a timestamp but it is just not happening. This has gone above my expertise and from my googling, it looks like I shouldn't be seeing what I am seeing so I am thinking there is a bigger problem I am missing.

I am getting a date string from a WordPress function and then trying to use PHP to convert it. All I want from the string is the Month and Day (eg Mar 07) but I am failing to get anything date related:

error_reporting(-1);
$my_post_date = '{{ post_data:post_date_gmt }}';
echo $my_post_date;    // Result: 2017-03-07 01:35:43
var_dump($my_post_date);    // Result: string(29) "2017-03-07 01:35:43"

$timestamp = strtotime($my_post_date);
var_dump($timestamp);    //Result: bool(false)

I can't understand why that date string is breaking strtotime().

I have debugging on and there is no error_log so I can't see any errors.

UPDATE: The following has potentially identified the issue but it still has me confused...

var_dump(substr($my_post_date, 0, 3)); // Returns: string(3) "{{ "

Answer 1

It would seem your dumps/echos have their contents substituted after printing.

Proof of this is that 2017-03-07 01:35:43 is only 19 characters long but the vardump gives "str(29)". So what you're feeding strtodate is {{ post_data:post_date_gmt }} Which it obviously wouldn't recognise.

So Wordpress performs the substitution at a later point during the execution