PHP’s DateTime hates handling variables directly

August 11, 2016

I’m working on an app and found that this keeps failing saying “DateTime __construct() Failed to parse time string (xxxxxxxx) at position x”

Code was as follows:

$epoch = 1447258140;
$dt = new DateTime($epoch); // This was the failing point
$timestamp = $dt-&gt;format('Y-m-d H:i:s');

But I learned here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17427503/php-datetime-construct-failed-to-parse-time-string-xxxxxxxx-at-position-x

That it’s best to just create the DateTime, then use one of its methods to set the time:

$epoch = 1447258140;
$dt = new DateTime();
$dt-&gt;setTimestamp($epoch); 
$timestamp = $dt-&gt;format('Y-m-d H:i:s');

That worked wonderfully!

php