Derick Rethans has posted about a new function he's whipped up for PHP's date/time functionality to handle the differences between US formatted dates and the British date formats - date_create_from_format.

From PHP 5.3 the new date_create_from_format() function and the DateTime::createFromFormat() factory method are available. As first argument they accept the expected format, and as second argument the string to parse.

He includes two examples - one showing it being used to parse a British date string and the other to show off the date_get_last_errors function that can be useful for debugging.