PHP: why is strtotime() returning "NOW()"? - php

Question

I'm calling strtotime() on a formatted datetime string and for some reason it always returns NOW()...
If my formatted datetime string (stored in the last_seen attribute) is: 2013-06-13 07:13:04
and I write the following code:
echo $user->last_seen;
echo date('F j, Y', strtotime($user->last_seen));
The output I get is:
NOW() January 1, 1970
What on earth is going wrong here??? This is definitely not the expected result. The string is stored in a MySQL database, if that makes any difference.
Edit: by request, the code used to create the attribute in the database is:
$user->last_seen = date('Y-m-d H:i:s');
$user->save;
Edit 2: by request, the code used to pull the users table, with the user we want, is:
$user = User::find($user_id);
(not very helpful, lol).
Edit 3: if I var_dump($user->last_seen) the result is:
object(Laravel\Database\Expression)#40 (1) { ["value":protected]=> string(5) "NOW()" }
Edit 4: If I echo var_dump(strtotime($user->last_seen)) the result is:
bool(false)
Edit 5: this problem was a result of me being an idiot, but some fine debugging was done by everyone who posted. Read the answers if you are interested.

Answer 1

First of all You check the return value of strtotime($user->last_seen)
If strtotime($user->last_seen) returns false then $user->last_seen may be empty or not a valid Date and Time Formats
var_dump(strtotime($user->last_seen))

Answer 2

Your problem is most likely not in the select clause, but lays there where you store your data.
When you are inserting the time in the database, you are probably doing
insert into myTable (fieldname) values ('now()');
instead of
insert into myTable (fieldname) values (now());
So you need to lose the quotes there...
You are NOT storing the time in the database, but the string now() ...
The best thing you could actually do is change the database column type from varchar to DateTime, so even the database knows it's a DateTime. Then you avoid having to cast it back to DateTime in PHP.

Answer 3

Oh dear god.... I'm going to kick myself for this one. I did a project wide Ctrl+F for last_seen and I discovered that in my routing scheme I had this:
Route::filter('before', function() {
if (Auth::check()) {
$user = Auth::user();
$user->last_seen = DB::raw('NOW()');
$user->save();
}
});
Walks away with tail between legs...