How to Convert a Date to Timestamp in PHP

Topic: PHP / MySQLPrev|Next

Answer: Use the strtotime() Function

You can use the PHP strtotime() function to convert any textual datetime into Unix timestamp.

The following example demonstrates how this function actually works:

<?php
$date1 = "2019-05-16";
$timestamp1 = strtotime($date1);
echo $timestamp1; // Outputs: 1557964800
 
$date2 = "16-05-2019";
$timestamp2 = strtotime($date2);
echo $timestamp2; // Outputs: 1557964800
 
$date3 = "16 May 2019";
$timestamp3 = strtotime($date3);
echo $timestamp3; // Outputs: 1557964800
?>

As you can see in the above example the resulting timestamp is equivalent for the same date with different format. You can also use other variations of English date format.

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