PHP DateTime exception and errors handling

Question

How can I prevent PHP to crash when creating a DateTime object?

$in = new DateTime($in);
$out = new DateTime($out);

$in and $out both comes from a form so they could be anything. I enforce the user to use a calendar and block it to dates with javascript. What if the user can bypass this check?

If $in = "anything else other than a date" PHP will crash and block the rendering of the whole page.

How do I prevent this and just return(0) if PHP is not able to parse the date?

Answer 1

Check out the documentation on DateTime(), here's a little snippet:

<?php
try {
    $date = new DateTime('2000-01-01');
} catch (Exception $e) {
    echo $e->getMessage();
    exit(1);
}

echo $date->format('Y-m-d');
?>

PHP Manual DateTime::__construct()

Answer 2

strtotime() will return false if the format is bad so this should catch bad formats.

if (strtotime($in) === false)
{
     // bad format
}