How can I work with dates before 1900 in PHP?

Question

I am using PHP and jQuery to build an interactive timeline which needs to display dates between 1500 and 2020. I usually use PHP\'s strtotime function when work

Answer 1

Using the wonderful Carbon Library, dates in the past are not a problem:

$date = Carbon::now();
$date->subCenturies(23);
echo $date->format('Y-m-d');
  // -0282-03-15

This works for dates where humans have been around. For everything else, using a date (with day and month, set on the AC/BC scale) does not make a lot of sense.