convert month from name to number

Is there an easy way to change $month = "July"; so that $nmonth = 7 (07 would be fine too). I could do a case statement, but surely there is already a function to convert? EDIT: I wish I could accept multiple answers, cause two of you basically gave me what I needed by your powers combined.

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

That will give the numerical value for $month. Thanks!

Try this:

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

Yes,

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

The m formats the month to its numerical representation there.

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.