convert month from name to number

An interesting look here, the code given by kelly works well,

$nmonth = date("m", strtotime($month));

but for the month of february, it won't work as expected when the current day is 30 or 31 on leap year and 29,30,31 on non-leap year.It will return 3 as month number. Ex:

$nmonth = date("m", strtotime("february"));

The solution is, add the year with the month like this:

$nmonth = date("m", strtotime("february-2012"));

I got this from this comment in php manual.

Yes,

$date = 'July 25 2010';
echo date('d/m/Y', strtotime($date));

The m formats the month to its numerical representation there.

Try this:

<?php
  $date = date_parse('July');
  var_dump($date['month']);
?>