PHP Doctrine 2: Convert UK date string to datetime

You have a form with a date field, and on submit you want to save the value as a Doctrine Datetime. You may find PHP's strtotime() function, but this will only work for dates in the US format (e.g. mm/dd/yyyy) and not the UK format (e.g. dd/mm/yyyy). The solution is to use DateTime::createFromFormat() which lets you specify the way the date string is formatted.

$result = DateTime::createFromFormat("d/m/Y", $dateString);

This can then be set as your datetime property on your entity, and persisted in the database. You can see which letters to use to represent your date format here.