Prevent PHP date() from defaulting to 12/31/1969

Question

I am using a MySQL database with PHP. I store my date values in the database using the DATETIME field.

I'm using this PHP code to convert inputted dates to the appropriate format for MySQL.

date("Y-m-d H:i:s", strtotime($inputDate))

However, whenever a date is invalid, it is placed in the database as 1969-12-31 19:00:00

Is there a way to default this to 0000-00-00 00:00:00 ?

Answer 1

Just detect validity with the output of strtotime(), which returns false on failure.

Something like:

$time = strtotime($inputDate);
$date = ($time === false) ? '0000-00-00 00:00:00' : date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $time);