PHP Wrong time after setting timezone - php

Question

I stumbled onto a really weird problem:
For my task I wrote a method that would give me the current date in a specific format,
another method would then extract the date so I could compare it with dates in the database.
public static function getCurrentDate()
{
return date("Y-m-d H:i:s a");
}
public static function extractDate($date)
{
return date("Y-m-d", strtotime($date));
}
Because I've noticed that the time wasn't right, I've set the default timezone at the beginning of the script like this:
date_default_timezone_set('Europe/Berlin');
Running this script, I've noticed that it gives the wrong output, maybe you could already help me here.
$currentDate = getCurrentDate();
echo $currentDate."\n";
$extractedDate = extractDate($currentDate );
echo $extractedDate."\n";
Output:
2020-08-25 21:58:13 pm
1970-01-01
Then I tried it in another way with DateTime, where it still produced the wrong output
public static function extractDate($date)
{
$timezone = new DateTimeZone('Europe/Berlin');
$dt = DateTime::createFromFormat("Y-m-d H:i:s a", $date, $timezone);
return $dt->format("Y-m-d");
}
Output:
2020-08-25 21:58:13 pm
2020-08-26
I would understand if there was an error so it would lead to the Unix epoch again, but this time it somehow added a day.
It would be nice if you knew where my error at the first approach was and I'm also really interested to hear why PHP behaves like that in the second approach

Answer 1

Change:
public static function getCurrentDate()
{
return date("Y-m-d H:i:s a");
}
to
public static function getCurrentDate()
{
return date("Y-m-d H:i:s");
}
and you are all set.
In 24h time you do not need the a or am/pm, which makes the datetime unrecognizable via strtotime, it cannot convert it , and it returns false, thus the invalid date 1970-01-01which is qeuivalent tounixtime = 0`