If statement returning false result using date and strtotime

I’m trying to use an if statement to say “If today is between two dates, do this…” etc.

It’s not working, and I’m at a total loss because as far as I can see – it SHOULD work!

if (date('d/m/y', strtotime('now')) >= date('d/m/y', strtotime('1 January 2021')) && date('d/m/y', strtotime('now')) <= date('d/m/y', strtotime('31 January 2021'))):
    echo 'true';
else:
    echo 'false';
endif;

Today is 3rd of December 2020 – so why is it telling me this statement is true?

PS. It does work if I change it to either, or both > 30th December 2020 and < 1st February 2021 – but I’m wary to do this in case it’s just a glitch and I’ve made an obvious coding mistake.

Answer

date('d/m/y') gives you a string like 30/11/20. Comparing dates in this format really means you’re comparing strings, which only works if the dates are in YYYYMMDD (or YYYY-MM-DD) format.

It’s much easier to just use strtotime() to turn the English-like date into a Unix timestamp (just a big integer) and compare them directly:

if ( 
    strtotime('now') >= strtotime('1 January 2021')
        &&
    strtotime('now') <= strtotime('31 January 2021')
) {
    echo 'true';
} else {
    echo 'false';
}