Verifiying 2 date to make sure they're valid dates - php

Question

I am working with a date which is formatted like so:
25/02/1994 - 15/03/2000
To get each date I am using the explode function to separate each date between dash
$newdate = explode("-",$olddate);
Now my problem is, if it was just one date I could split it up in to 3 parts, the day, month, year and use the checkdate function to validate the month, but because I am using explode I cannot split it up like that (to my knowledge)
What would be the best way to validate the date for legitimacy?

Answer 1

You have a good start, after you exploded your string by -, just simply loop through each date with array_reduce() and reduce it to 1 value.
In the anonymous function you just explode() each date and check with checkdate() if it is a valid date, e.g.
<?php
$str = "25/02/1994 - 15/03/2000";
$dates = explode("-", $str);
if(array_reduce($dates, function($keep, $date){
list($day, $month, $year) = array_map("trim",explode("/", $date));
if(!checkdate($month, $day, $year))
return $keep = FALSE;
return $keep;
}, TRUE)) {
echo "all valid dates";
}
?>

Answer 2

$date = '25/02/1994 - 15/03/2000';
$date_array = explode("-", $date);
$first_date = explode("/", trim($date_array[0]));
$second_date = explode("/", trim($date_array[1]));
if(checkdate($first_date[1],$first_date[0],$first_date[2])){
//do stuff
}
if(checkdate($second_date[1],$second_date[0],$second_date[2])){
//do stuff
}
or, what Daan suggested using the DateTime object.
$date = '25/02/1994 - 15/03/2000';
$date_array = explode("-", $date);
$date1 = DateTime::createFromFormat('j-M-Y', $date_array[0]);
$date2 = DateTime::createFromFormat('j-M-Y', $date_array[1]);
if($date1){
//do stuff
}
if($date2){
//do stuff
}