PHP detect if search is date or not

Question

I have a search box on my website...mysql database. I check currently if the keyword search is a category or just a sentence that matches the title. I would like to enhance that further by detecting if a date is the search keyword, then it will know that and SELECT * posts relevant to that date. How can I detect if it is a date or not? maybe a regular expression?

For your info, I am using the standard format of YYYY/MM/DD so e.g. 2012/07/21.

Answer 1

I'd test it with strtotime().

$keyword;

$time = strtotime($keyword);

if ($time !== false) {
  // $keyword is a parsable date!
}

Answer 2

You might want to look at the PHP function strtotime(), which returns a timestamp or FALSE if not a date...