I'm trying to implement an anti-bot timer on my contact form as suggested by @BrowserBugs here

But I'd also like to include the time in the email so I can check what I'm doing and because it would be useful. 

If I simply put the posted value 'sent' into a variable and include that in the email I get the complete php code from the form input not the date-time. And if I use strtotime on 'sent' first I don't get anything in the resulting variable.

What am I missing?

TIA

Paul

Ahoy. If you could post the form i can take a look. If you just want to know the date and time the email was sent use;

$date_sent = date('Y-m-d H:i:s');

this gets the current server date and time at the point of process. If you want a different format look at date format.

Thanks, my php is not great so apologies if this is obvious. What I was specifically trying to do was get the value of 'sent' from your 

<input name="sent" type="hidden" value="<?php echo date('Y-m-d H:i:s');?>">

but when I do

$submitted = $_POST['sent'];

the variable $submitted contains

<?php echo date('Y-m-d H:i:s');?>

not the date string I was expecting. Which makes me think I'm missing something. I tried combinations of strtotime and dateformat but can't get it to work and although my php skills may be letting me down I wondered again if I'm missing something more fundamental.

Ah! The $submitted is already a date time value, e.g. 2018-03-29 10:28:16. To change it's format to 23/03/2018 @ 10:28 would be;

<?php echo date("d/m/Y @ H:i", strtotime($submitted)); ?>

What strtotime does is "parses an English textual datetime into a Unix timestamp (the number of seconds since January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT)" (source). With date the first bit is the output format, the second value is the time which if left out defaults to now, but if you give it "2018-03-29 10:28:16" it turns that into the unix timestamp then turns it back into the format you wanted.

Yes, I was expecting $submitted to be a date but currently it contains the whole php code verbatim from the input section of the form and not 2018-03-29 10:28:16 as I was expecting. 

Thanks for clarification on strtotime - that explains why my time check doesn't work because it's not getting a date as input but the string intended to generate the date.

Do I need to put

$submitted = $_POST['sent'];

into a

if($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD']=='POST')
{
$submitted=$_POST('sent');
}

construct?

1 hour ago, DonkeyWorx said:

Yes, I was expecting $submitted to be a date but currently it contains the whole php code verbatim from the input section of the form and not 2018-03-29 10:28:16 as I was expecting. 

Sounds like something is processing all fields, what else is the code doing? A quick test is a clean sheet, try;

<?php
$msg = "";
if($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD']=="POST") {
	$msg .= "I have posted";
	$date_sent = trim($_POST['sent']);
	if($date_sent!="") { $msg .= " at " . $date_sent . " also known as " . date("jS F, Y", strtotime($date_sent)) . " or " . date("d/m/Y @ H:i", strtotime($date_sent)); }
}
?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
  <title>Test Post</title>
  </head>
  <body>
<?php if($msg!="") { echo "<p>" . $msg . "</p>"; } ?>
    <form method="post">
      <input type="hidden" name="sent" value="<?php echo date('Y-m-d H:i:s'); ?>">
      <input name="submit" type="submit" value="1">
    </form>
  </body>
</html>

 

Many thanks - that successfully highlighted my stupidity.   The form was in an html page not a php file so the php wasn't executing. Knew I was missing something obvious. 

1 hour ago, DonkeyWorx said:

Knew I was missing something obvious. 

All guilty there mate