Question: I'm looking at the PayPal `IPN docs`, and it says the `datetime` stamps of their strings are formatted as:

```
HH:MM:SS DD Mmm YY, YYYY PST

```

So year is specified twice?

Once in double digits, and another with 4 digits? 

This looks bizarre.

Answer: 
This seems to be a bug in the documentation. The actual format should be "HH:MM:SS Mmm DD, YYYY PST" (e.g. "08:30:06 Apr 19, 2017 PDT")
Actually in PHP you need to use date("Y-m-d\TH:i:s\Z") . That will result in something that looks like 2012-04-30T00:05:47Z -- I didn't notice a difference between urlencoded and non.

Where are you guys finding this info? This information is elusive in their documentation and cost me an hour or two of hunting and trying stuff. The only place I see this format is in the TIMESTAMP field. Having a hard time with the PayPal NVP API's PROFILESTARTDATE for CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile and a "Subscription start date should be valid" error.