PHP : Better date parser than strtotime

Question

I'm trying to parse a string in a specific format and I'm really surprised to discover that I can't find a good function to do that.

The only one I found is strtotime and it doesn't fit as it guesses the date format. I really don't trust the "guess" part. Moreover my string input is in a french format (dd/mm/aaaa) which it seems that it's not well understood (it parses american formats like mm/dd/aaaa).

What I'm looking for is a function that take in input a date string and a format to parse. I could do it myself with a regexp but I can't believe that it doesn't already exist.

I found :

• DateTime::createFromFormat(). But it only work with PHP 5.3 and I don't have the power to upgrade the PHP version (5.2)
• strptime(). This method does what I want but is not implemented on windows platform (by the way: WTF ??)

Any suggestion ?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, it seems that such parsing is better done manually, by exploding the string at slashes and then switching day and month.