Checking date issue - php

Question

I'm trying really hard to do some date validation. I have created like 3 different functions, they all work but not in special cases.
The last thing I did was this:
public function valid_date($date, $format = 'd/m/Y'){
$d = DateTime::createFromFormat($format, $date);
return $d && $d->format($format) == $date;
}
I got this function from php site, and like I thought it worked better than mine I replaced it.
The date format the user has to input is dd/mm/YYYY and in the database format is yyyy-mm-dd 00:00:00
When i enter this invalid date: 30/30/1996 the function recognizes it as a valid date. Then I have this other function to explode the "/" and to make it like the database format with "-" and in that function it gives me the error:
DateTime::__construct(): Failed to parse time string (1996-30-30) at position 6 (0): Unexpected character'
public function explodingDates($date){
list($day,$month,$year) = explode('/', $date);
$newDate = $year.'-'.$month.'-'.$day;
return (new \Datetime($newDate));
}
I'm burning my brain here, don't know what else to do for the validation. It also has to be prepared to receive any kind of input (like "askhdakjdh", "123213", "1.25/269") and return an invalid date.
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Don't explode date strings. Use DateTime::createFromFormat() to create the DateTime object, and use the format() method to convert it into a different format:
function ConvertToMySQLDate($datestr) {
$d = DateTime::createFromFormat('d/m/Y', $datestr);
$valid = $d && $d->format('d/m/Y') == $datestr;
if ($valid) {
return $d->format('Y-m-d');
}
return FALSE;
}
The above function accepts a date string in the format dddd-mm-yyyy, checks if it is valid, and returns the date in MySQL format (yyyy-mm-dd). It returns false if the supplied date is not valid.
Example usage:
var_dump(ConvertToMySQLDate('30/30/1996')); // bool(false)
var_dump(ConvertToMySQLDate('13/12/1996')); // string(10) "1996-12-13"
Demo