PHP timestamp for dates before 1970?

**crishchun** · September 4th, 2004, 8:20 PM

I thought PHP can handle negative timestamps from 1901 to 1970 and positive timestamps from 1970 to 2038? But when I execute this code:

PHP Code:


			
<?php

 $bday = "31 December 1959";

 echo "$bday<br />";

 echo strtotime($bday) . "<br />";

?>

I get an error (-1) for the output.

Quote:

31 December 1959
-1

I have a 'person_birthday' field in a MySQL database table which stores dates as timestamps, so when that when I retrieve it, I can use date() to format the timestamp to my liking. But I can't store any bdays before 1970? How can I fix or work around this problem? Thanks for your replies.

By the way, I'm on a shared host Linux server.

September 4th, 2004, 9:04 PM

My guess and most likely wrong, is that it could be the caused of the 2000/1900 bug from the 1970 where the programmers only put 2 binary digits instead of 4. The other wild guess is that that was the Time of Punch-Cards.

You might wanna send this question to the "horse's mouth" and get the better answer.

**patrickb** · September 4th, 2004, 10:21 PM

From php.net:

Quote:

Note: The valid range of a timestamp is typically from Fri, 13 Dec 1901 20:45:54 GMT to Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 GMT. (These are the dates that correspond to the minimum and maximum values for a 32-bit signed integer.) Additionally, not all platforms support negative timestamps, therefore your date range may be limited to no earlier than the Unix epoch. This means that e.g. dates prior to Jan 1, 1970 will not work on Windows, some Linux distributions, and a few other operating systems.

Sorry, it won't work. Best bet is to design a function to convert the string yourself to a value suitable for this type of thing. YYYYMMDD would be a good bet. Timestamps are more geared towards tracking entry times and the such, not tracking birthdays.

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September 4th, 2004, 9:04 PM	#2 (permalink)
Dark Matter Guest n/a posts	My guess and most likely wrong, is that it could be the caused of the 2000/1900 bug from the 1970 where the programmers only put 2 binary digits instead of 4. The other wild guess is that that was the Time of Punch-Cards. You might wanna send this question to the "horse's mouth" and get the better answer.

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