asked on

Date Verifying

Hi,
I have a form that posts to a php page to verify some data for me. What I wanted help with was the verification of a date. The the form suggests to enetr the date in the form dd-mm-yyyy on entry, but the field is not restricted to allow a formatted entry (as I don't know how to do this if it's possible). I want to check that that each part is within the valid range, and also that the whole string is not completely wrong.

I realise I can use the following:-

$dateparts=explode("-",$_POST['date']);

if (dateparts[0] <= 31 && dateparts[1] <= 12 && ....)
{....}

or similar to that, but will this handle errors if the user were to enter something silly for the date, such as:

12.5-6-1985

or

January 6th 2000

I'm not worried about checking about invalid dates such as 30-02-2005. Just for completely incorrectly formatted data.

Thanks in advance,
Chisel

P.S. Hope I am clear enough

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Roonaan

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prsupriya

You can write a JS function to validate that date entry value.

Try this link:

http://javascript.internet.com/forms/format-date.html

S:

Chisel

ASKER

I tried your code Roonann, but couldn't get it to work in with my code, so I did a little test with it and got the following results, am I doing something wrong?

$dateparts="12-12-2005" //As would be passed from my form

printf("%s",$dateparts); //Show the 'passed' value
printf("%s",date('d-m-Y',$dateparts)); //Show the date after formatting with your code

This gave me the result:-

12-12-2005
01-01-1970 (This being what was generated by your code, not what I'd expect).

Chisel

ASKER

prsupriya, I would like to try and keep my code as plain PHP as much as possible, rather than rely on client side javascript operations, as I want my code to be as platform independant as possible.

Chisel

ASKER

Also, with your code Roonaan, I realised I left out the strtotime part in that example, but I used both, with the strtotime part added in the date was also wrong, and gave:

28-05-2018

Roonaan

date accepts a timestamp as second parameter. $dataparts is a date string. Therefor you have to use strtotime to interpret the date string:

Use:
printf("%s",date('d-m-Y',strtotime($dateparts))); //Show the date after formatting with your code
Instead of
printf("%s",date('d-m-Y',$dateparts)); //Show the date after formatting with your code

-r-

SOLUTION

theevilworm

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Chisel

ASKER

Thanks, after changing 'd-m-Y' to 'Y-m-d' as suggested by theevilworm, and having PHP rearrange the passed date into that form the 2 answers now come out correctly in my test code.

No I just need to implement this in my code to make sure it works there.

Chisel

ASKER

Thanks, it works great.

I've split the points between Roonaan and theevilworm, as I used the code provided by Roonaan, but modifed to accept the date properly as suggested by theevilworm.