truncate and substring

would be useful.

and:
the string to date work only with american format month day year
but not with the european format day month year, and convert in unix timestamp and not in date.
eg. i need to convert a string like 27/11/2012 (today) in the date european format, not in timestamp.

eg.: date("d/m/Y", strtotime(preg_replace("/([0-9]{2})\/([0-9]{2})\/([0-9]{4})/i", "$2/$1/$3", '24/10/2012')));