1970-01-01 is getting inserted to database when no date is selected

Question

I have a text box where date is entered in php. Since I want the date to be in particular format I am using. date("d.m.Y", strtotime()) to conver the date. When no date is give or if I leave the textbox blank it will enter 1970-01-01 to database. How can I solve this? Here is my code

 $d_date= clean($_POST['datum']);
$newdate = date("Y-m-d", strtotime( $d_date));

If $d_date value is null the it will enter 1970-01-01 to database.

Answer 1

Make field in the database nullable, and when date is not submitted in the form set it to NULL. Default behaviour of mysql is to set date to default value, which is 1970-01-01(unix epoch)