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 <alpine.DEB.2.20.1509081716300.18802@whisky.home.derickrethans.nl>
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2015 06:22:22 +0900
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To: Derick Rethans <derick@php.net>
Cc: "internals@lists.php.net" <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: Invalid date/time handling - strtotime()
From: yohgaki@ohgaki.net (Yasuo Ohgaki)

Hi Derick,

On Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 1:31 AM, Derick Rethans <derick@php.net> wrote:
> Currently, it works as follows by design:
>
> - the parser, allows for each unit (year, month, day, hour, minute,
>   second) the full range of values. For a year that's just 4 digits, for
>   a month that's 0-12, day is 0-31 and for hour and minute it's 0-59.
>
> - 60 is allowed for seconds, as sometimes date strings with that
>   leapsecond do show up. But PHP implements Unix time where "60" is not
>   a valid second number and hence it overflows. There is some more
>   background information at http://drck.me/leapsec-6ye
>
> - strtotime() returns false if any number is outside of the ranges, and
>   new DateTime() throws an exception.
>
> - the parser is dumb, and doesn't do any checks to make it faster (and
>   more generic)
>
> - *but*, there is an additional check if you pass in an invalid date
>   (like your suggested $strict):
>
>   $ php -r '$res = date_parse("2015-09-31"); var_dump($res["warnings"]);'
>
>   array(1) {
>     [11] =>
>     string(27) "The parsed date was invalid"
>   }
>
> - It is already possible to handle the edge cases, but then you need to
>   supply the right format. Otherwise there are too many possible
>   confusing and unintuitive results coming out of the parser:
>
>   php -r '$res = date_create_from_format("Y-m-d", "2015-09-34"); var_dump($res);'
>
>   class DateTime#1 (3) {
>     public $date =>
>     string(26) "2015-10-04 17:24:43.000000"
>     public $timezone_type =>
>     int(3)
>     public $timezone =>
>     string(13) "Europe/London"
>   }
>
> - We can't add a second argument to strtotime(), because it already
>   exists.
>
> - Having a "strict" option to strtotime() does also not work, as that
>   would mean two distinct parsing routines.
>
> With all those concerns, as well as functionality to handle edge cases
> in place, I do not think we should change anything.

Thank you for detailed explanation.
I'm OK with current design/API. How about add documentation for more precise
date/time parsing and handling to strtotime() manual page?

One concern is "0000-00-00" date. MySQL uses it as invalid date and strtotime()
produces non intuitive result. It should be added to the document also.

I made a bug report to track this.
https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=70463

Regards,

--
Yasuo Ohgaki
yohgaki@ohgaki.net