A non well formed numeric value encountered

Question

I have a form that passes two dates (start and finish) to a PHP script that will add those to a DB. I am having problems validating this. I keep getting the following errors

A non well formed numeric value encountered

This is when I use the following

date("d",$_GET['start_date']);

But when I use the strtotime() function as advised by many sites I get a unix timestamp date of 1/1/1970. Any ideas how I can get the correct date?

Answer 1

If the error is at the time of any calculation, double check that the values does not contains any comma(,). Values must be only in integer/ float format.

Answer 2

I ran into this same situation (in my case with a date value in a custom PHP field in a Drupal view), and what worked for me was using intval instead of strtotime to turn the value into an integer - because it basically was a timestamp, but in the form of a string rather than an integer. Obviously that won't be the case for everyone, but it might be worth a try.

Answer 3

You need to set the time zone using date_default_timezone_set().

Answer 4

Because you are passing a string as the second argument to the date function, which should be an integer.

string date ( string $format [, int $timestamp = time() ] )

Try strtotime which will Parse about any English textual datetime description into a Unix timestamp (integer):

date("d", strtotime($_GET['start_date']));

Answer 5

This is an old question, but there is another subtle way this message can happen. It's explained pretty well here, in the docs.

Imagine this scenerio:

try {
  // code that triggers a pdo exception
} catch (Exception $e) {
  throw new MyCustomExceptionHandler($e);
}

And MyCustomExceptionHandler is defined roughly like:

class MyCustomExceptionHandler extends Exception {
  public function __construct($e) {
    parent::__construct($e->getMessage(), $e->getCode());
  }
}

This will actually trigger a new exception in the custom exception handler because the Exception class is expecting a number for the second parameter in its constructor, but PDOException might have dynamically changed the return type of $e->getCode() to a string.

A workaround for this would be to define you custom exception handler like:

class MyCustomExceptionHandler extends Exception {
  public function __construct($e) {
    parent::__construct($e->getMessage());
    $this->code = $e->getCode();
  }
}

Answer 6

$_GET['start_date'] is not numeric is my bet, but an date format not supported by strtotime. You will need to re-format the date to a workable format for strtotime or use combination of explode/mktime.

I could add you an example if you'd be kind enough to post the format you currently receive.