<?php
$Date = "06/15/2003";
sscanf( $Date, "%02d/%02d/%4d", &$DateMM, &$DateDD, &$DateYYYY );
print "date: $Date<br>";
print "MM: $DateMM<br>";
print "DD: $DateDD<br>";
print "YYYY: $DateYYYY<br>"
?>

produces this output:

Date: 06/15/2003
MM: 6
DD: 15
YYYY: 2003

Notice that for $DateMM, I specified '%02d", yet the parsed month is '6' and not '06'.

According to Example 1 in the PHP manual for sprintf
(http://www.php.net/manual/html/function.sprintf.html) the correct format for zero padded integers is:

sprintf ("%04d-%02d-%02d", $year, $month, $day);