DateTime::createFromFormat not working as expected

Question

Running PHP 5.3.28

I have a particular date getting returned as a string that strtotime is choking on, so I thought to try out DateTime::createFromFormat(), however despite best efforts getting errors.

<?php

$freshdate = '09/07/2015 (Mon)';
$date = DateTime::createFromFormat("m/d/Y (D)", $freshdate);
if (!$date) {
  var_dump('error', DateTime::getLastErrors());
}

Result is:

array (size=4)
  'warning_count' => int 0
  'warnings' => array (size=0)
  'error_count' => int 2
  'errors' => array (size=2)
      12 => string 'A textual day could not be found' (length=32)
      16 => string 'Data missing' (length=12)

Answer 1

This is bug in PHP#65554:

createFromFormat fails when in the format D or l is followed by separators that are not space or comma.

How to fix? Change your format or upgrade your PHP version.