A non well formed numeric value encountered on Date()
<p>There's lots of questions of StackOverflow about "A non well formed numeric value encountered" but none of them appear to be about the same situation as mine.</p>

<p>I have a server running PHP 5.3.6-6~dotdeb.1 that throws up the above error when it encounters this line:</p>

<pre><code>$date = date("Y-m-d H:i:s", "2016-02-05 12:03:00");
</code></pre>

<p>It's a simple line that worked previously, but now doesn't. What's going on?</p>

<p>There's no error when I use this line:</p>

<pre><code>$date = date("Y-m-d H:i:s", strtotime("2016-02-05 12:03:00"));
</code></pre>