PHP : Better date parser than strtotime
<p>I'm trying to parse a string in a specific format and I'm really surprised to discover that I can't find a good function to do that.</p>

<p>The only one I found is <strong>strtotime</strong> and it doesn't fit as it <em>guesses</em> the date format. I really don't trust the "guess" part.
Moreover my string input is in a french format (dd/mm/aaaa) which it seems that it's not well understood (it parses american formats like mm/dd/aaaa).</p>

<p>What I'm looking for is a function that take in input a date string and a format to parse.
I could do it myself with a regexp but I can't believe that it doesn't already exist.</p>

<p>I found :</p>

<ul>
<li><a href="http://fr3.php.net/manual/en/datetime.createfromformat.php" rel="nofollow">DateTime::createFromFormat()</a>. But it only work with PHP 5.3 and I don't have the power to upgrade the PHP version (5.2)</li>
<li><a href="http://fr3.php.net/manual/en/function.strptime.php" rel="nofollow">strptime()</a>. This method does what I want but is not implemented on windows platform (by the way: WTF ??)</li>
</ul>

<p>Any suggestion ?</p>
