Laravel 5.3 date validator: equal to or after start_date

Question

I\'m using Laravel 5.3 to validate start_date and end_date for an event. end_date should be equal to start_date or the after date. end_date >= start_date

Answer 1

Be careful when you set a validation rule after_or_equal:now and date_format with a format without hours, minutes or seconds!

For example:

$validationRules = [
    'my_time_start' => [
        'date_format:Y-m-d',// format without hours, minutes and seconds.
        'after_or_equal:now'
    ]
];

Laravel passing all date fields into the strtotime() function. Including now string. And strtotime('now') will return a unix timestamp with current minutes, hours and seconds.

For example, the today date is 2020-05-03. When you send a date value 2020-05-03 into your script, Laravel will pass 2 values into the strtotime() for compare:

strtotime('2020-05-03'); // always 1588489200
strtotime('now'); // NOT PREVIOUS VALUE, a different value each second, timestamp including current minutes, hour and seconds.

And you will always fail a validation (exclude a 1 second of the day).

To fix it, you should use:

$validationRules = [
    'my_time_start' => [
        'date_format:Y-m-d',// format without hours, minutes and seconds.
        'after_or_equal:' . date('Y-m-d'), // not 'now' string
    ]
];