> For clean Markdown content of this page, append .md to this URL. For the complete documentation index, see https://buildwithfern.com/learn/llms.txt. ## 2.21.0 **`(feat):`** Add `rejectEmptyDateTimeStrings` (opt-in). `deserializeDateTime("")` returned the *current wall-clock time* rather than raising: PHP's `DateTime` constructor treats an empty string as "construct for the current moment" and does not throw, so the surrounding catch never fired. Any API that sends `""` to mean "not set" therefore produced a plausible, entirely fabricated timestamp with no way for the caller to detect it — a value that can be written back to a database and is indistinguishable from real data afterwards. A malformed string was always handled correctly; it was specifically the empty string that slipped through. The sibling `deserializeDate` already rejects `""`, so this also removes an inconsistency between the two. Opt-in because it turns a value callers currently receive into an exception.