PHP format date with milliseconds works but parse fails - php

Question

I'm using the following format Y-m-d\TH:i:s.v\Z to follow the JavaScript toISOString implementation (2011-10-05T14:48:00.000Z).
Everything works fine if I have a DateTime and I want to format it, however I cannot parse a string that uses this format.
$format = 'Y-m-d\TH:i:s.v\Z';
$stringDateTime = (new \DateTime())->format($format);
var_dump(date_create_from_format($format,$stringDateTime));
I'm using PHP 7 and I have tested the code above with PHP 7.0,7.1 and 7.2. The return that I expect in line 3 is a DateTime class, however I'm getting a false due to there is a parse problem.
I hope someone can clarify this behavior.
Thanks

Answer 1

Datetime will handle it fine, you won't need to create from format.
<?php
$format = 'Y-m-d\TH:i:s.v\Z';
$stringDateTime = (new \DateTime())->format($format);
var_dump(date_create($stringDateTime));
https://3v4l.org/phLE1
Result:
object(DateTime)#1 (3) {
["date"]=>
string(26) "2018-03-13 18:07:30.005000"
["timezone_type"]=>
int(2)
["timezone"]=>
string(1) "Z"
}
This also works:
<?php
$format = 'Y-m-d\TH:i:s.u\Z';
$stringDateTime = (new \DateTime())->format($format);
var_dump(date_create_from_format($format, $stringDateTime));
$format = \DateTime::ISO8601;
$stringDateTime = (new \DateTime())->format($format);
var_dump(date_create_from_format($format, $stringDateTime));
https://3v4l.org/FcUqe
object(DateTime)#1 (3) {
["date"]=>
string(26) "2018-03-13 18:15:10.011717"
["timezone_type"]=>
int(3)
["timezone"]=>
string(16) "Europe/Amsterdam"
}
object(DateTime)#1 (3) {
["date"]=>
string(26) "2018-03-13 18:15:10.000000"
["timezone_type"]=>
int(1)
["timezone"]=>
string(6) "+01:00"
}