PHP: Format MySQL DATE and DATETIME
25.06.2008 Tags: tutorial,PHP,Version française disponible ici! A couple of days ago, I saw a website with some PHP scripts and functions, including one allowing you to convert MySQL dates (in YYYY-MM-DD format) to a "human" format, something like DD-MM-YYYY. Their method (well, "their" method... most of the snippets I saw afterwards worked with the same one) is to do an explode() of the date string, rebuild an array with the values inverted and implode array's values with a delimiter. It looks like this:<?php
function dateConv($value) {
$table = explode('-',$value);
$temp_array = array();
for ($i=2;$i>=0;$i--) {
array_push($temp_array,$table[$i]);
}
$final = implode('/',$temp_array);
print_r($final);
}
?>
Hmm yeah, it does work but we can do better: using strtotime() and strftime().
strtotime() converts an english date format to a timestamp.
strftime() formats a date to the given format.
Ok, and what can we do with that?
<?php
function dateConv($value) {
$final = strftime('%d-%m-%Y', strtotime($value));
print_r($final);
}
?>
We convert $value (our date) to a timestamp and format it to what we want, here to something with this format: DD-MM-YYYY.
We also can go further and covnert a DATETIME format:
<?php
function dateConv($value) {
$final = strftime('%d-%m-%Y %T', strtotime($value)); // %T is the format HH:MM:SS
print_r($final);
}
?>
Let's imagine our DATETIME is 2008-08-25 22:47:04, this function will return 25-08-2008 22:47:04
We can also return only the date by removing the format tag ' %T' in our function.
And why not also defining our delimiter? Not everyone wants date's values separated by a - but prefers a /
<?php
function dateConv($value,$delimiter) {
$final = strftime('%d'.$delimiter.'%m'.$delimiter.'%Y %T', strtotime($value));
print_r($final);
}
?>
You can go to php.net to have the list of format tags.
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Comments
mysql format date
07.01.2010, 19:57:33
Here is a good website for formatting dates using the MySQL date_format function http://www.mysqlformatdate.com
