strtotime - a second before midnight

I attempted this:

$date_string = strtotime('6 Mar, 2011 23:59:59');

But I think PHP can't interpret that for some reason as it returned empty. I tried this:

$date_string = strtotime('6 Mar, 2开发者_C百科011 midnight');

The above worked but I need it to be a second before midnight i.e. the last second of the day. How can I get strtotime to return this without changing the 6 Mar, 2011 part?

Hope this helps. I used this and it gives todays timestamp just before midnight. Counter intuitive.

$today_timestamp =  strtotime('tomorrow - 1 second');

It works for me if I use March 6, 2011 23:59:59. Any chance of changing the input format?

Other than that, you could of course subtract 1 second from the timestamp. Note however that you need to use March 7:

$date_string = strtotime('7 Mar, 2011 midnight') - 1;

Why not use mktime?

mktime(23,59,59,3,6,2011);

If you're on PHP 5.3 or greater, you could use the DateTime class.

The createFromFormat function allows you to manually specify how to parse your input date string.

$date = '6 Mar, 2011 23:59:59';
$timestamp = DateTime::createFromFormat('d M, Y H:i:s', $date)->getTimestamp();