Why does strtotime('a') return a time?

Question

I am looping through a CSV file in PHP 5.3 and checking for dates. I have been using strtotime(), and it has worked well, except for one field I have that contains either a 1 or 2 char code.

strtotime() on any single char code seems to act like I am asking for now(), but if the code is 2 chars, it fails, as I would expect it to.

What am I not understanding about the way strtotime() works?

Answer 1

Take a look at http://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.formats.time.php time formats. It seems that 'a' is a timezone. It might just be a mistake that 'a' works and it's resolving to something else, but at least that's the explanation.

Answer 2

strtotime basically does it best to interpret what it your text means, I don't think you can rely on it failing on certain strings.

Example:

<?php

echo 'Now: ' . date('c') . PHP_EOL;
echo PHP_EOL;
for($c = 'A'; $c <= 'z'; $c = chr(ord($c) + 1)) {
    echo $c . ' - ' . date('c', strtotime($c)) . PHP_EOL;
}

If I put the output next to http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/military/ , I can only support @tandu 's conclusion that it interprets it as timezones (including the J letter that results in an invalid date).

It's a best effort, I guess. If you have a problem with the way it deals with single letters, add a check up front. Not really nice, but that's what you get when you try to parse irregular data.