How can I prevent PHP to crash when creating a DateTime object?
$in = new DateTime($in);
$out = new DateTime($out);
$in and $out both comes from a form so they could be anything. I enforce the user to use a calendar and block it to dates with javascript. What if the user can bypass this check?
If $in = "anything else other than a date" PHP will crash and block the rendering of the whole page.
How do I prevent this and just return(0) if PHP is not able to parse the date?
Check out the documentation on DateTime(), here's a little snippet:
<?php
try {
$date = new DateTime('2000-01-01');
} catch (Exception $e) {
echo $e->getMessage();
exit(1);
}
echo $date->format('Y-m-d');
?>
strtotime() will return false if the format is bad so this should catch bad formats.
if (strtotime($in) === false)
{
// bad format
}
What about exception handling?
try {
$in = new DateTime($in);
} catch (Exception $e) {
echo $e->getMessage();
return(0);
}
The DateTime constructor will throw an Exception if the date/time string cannot be parsed. You can catch it. Have a look at the following snippet:
try {
$dt = new DateTime('10th - 12th June 2013'); // bad date string
} catch (Exception $e) {
var_dump($e->getMessage());
}
