title: A non well formed numeric value encountered
body: <p>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 </p>
  
  <p><strong>A non well formed numeric value encountered</strong></p>
  
  <p>This is when I use the following </p>
  
  <pre><code>date("d",$_GET['start_date']);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But when I use the <strong>strtotime()</strong> 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?</p>