get strtotime of specific time in php

Question

I want to get the timestamp of a day/time for eg

17/12/2014 8pm

Currently I am doing

$curtime = strtotime(date("Y-m-d H:i:s"));

which is giving me the current timestamp but I need to be of 8pm.

Any help is highly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If you're trying to get a timestamp of today at 8pm, it's actually much more simple than using date since you can use relative times in a strtotime:

$curtime = strtotime('today 8pm');

If you test this with date:

echo date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $curtime); // Returns 2014-12-17 20:00:00

Here's a whole writeup on relative date formats that explains how you can construct proper relative dates.

Answer 2

The best way to do this is using date_create_from_format. Checking out format's parameters, you will end up with something like this:

    $date = date_create_from_format('d/m/Y ga', '17/12/2014 8pm');
    if (!empty($date)) {//returns false if can't create date
        $timestamp = $date->getTimestamp();
        //echo date('d/m/Y H:i:s', $timestamp);
    }