PHP date/strtotime converting to incorrect date

Question

On some occasions data() is converting my dates incorrectly.

My date formats look like so: Fri Oct 25 15:00:00 EDT 2011

The date string comes from an external source, so I'm unable to change the format.

// output incorrect - Fri, 28 Oct 2011 15:00:00 -0400
date("r", strtotime("Fri Oct 25 15:00:00 EDT 2011"))

// output correct - Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:00:00 -0400
date("r", strtotime("Fri Oct 21 15:00:00 EDT 2011"))

I can't figure out why just changing the day makes it fail to convert.

My end goal is to create a DateTime object but it suffers from the same problem.

// output - Fri Oct 28 19:00:00 EDT 2011
DateTime("Fri Oct 22 19:00:00 EDT 2011")

Answer 1

Oct 25/2011 is a tuesday. Strtotime is interpreting your date string as "what's the next friday AFTER Oct 25th", and is returning (what it thinks) is the correct answer: October 28th.

So, the GIGO rule applies. You're feeding in garbage, and wondering why you're getting garbage out.

Answer 2

The value you're passing into strtotime doesn't tally. There's no Friday 25th, 2011.

http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/monthly.html

Answer 3

date() works fine. Problem is, in your examples with incorrect output specified date is not Friday .

You can strip out first 4 characters if it always is Fri .