title: strtotime() considered harmful?
body: <p>It seems like a lot of people struggle with date/time issues in PHP, and inevitably, many of the accepted answers tend to be &quot;<a href="https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%22strtotime%22">Use <code>strtotime</code> in this way</a>.&quot;</p>
  <p>Is this really the best way to direct people dealing with date problems? I'm beginning to feel like <code>strtotime</code> is sort of a nifty trick that shouldn't necessarily be relied on for important date/time calculations, and by the nature of it taking arbitrary strings, it seems like a potential source of buggy, hard-to-predict behavior. Its inability to differentiate between MM/DD/YYYY and DD/MM/YYYY is sort of a big deal, no?</p>
  <p>StackOverflow is usually very good at promoting good practices (I rarely see a <code>mysql_real_escape_string</code> conversation that doesn't have someone say &quot;Use PDO instead.&quot;)</p>
  <p>But there doesn't seem to be an accepted norm around date issues in PHP, with a lot of people falling back on the crutch that is <code>strtotime</code>.</p>
  <p>So, what should we be doing about this, if anything at all? Is there a better norm we should be enforcing for people asking questions like &quot;How do I add 1 week to X&quot;, or &quot;How do I convert this date format to this other date format?&quot;</p>
  <p>What is the best, most reliable way to deal with Date/Time issues like <code>strtotime</code> tries to, but too often fails to?</p>