Date formatting from a database....

Anon

Hi there,

I have a date in the database. I would like to extract is and display it in long format.

ie: 2001-04-18 --> Tuesday, April 18, 2001

Is there a function to do this with php?

Stretchy

[deleted]

How did you store the data in the database, as a string or an int or a DATE type?

shmert

Once you can get the date into as a timestamp, you can use the date() function to do any crazy format you need. To get your sql value into timestamp format, you will want to use the mktime function. Example:

$sqldate = '2001-04-18';
$dateArray = explode("_", $sqldate);
$timestamp = mktime(0,0,0, $dateArray[1],$dateArray[2],$dateArray[0]);
echo date ("l, F j, Y", $timestamp);

It might be a good idea to add some checks for a time after the date, which would break this example code.

mistcat

sure use strtotime to get a unix timestamp and then use the date function to format that puppy right up. =)

check out
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php

Anon

To start with look at date() and getdate().

e.g.
date("l, F d Y", timestamp);

To format your variable see:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php
and
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.getdate.php

If you are using MySQL it has a built in date format (see the manual) which is a more efficient way to get the date out (other databases also have this function). In your SQL query you would do something like this:

"SELECT *, date_format(date, '%b %e, %Y') as date, from mytable";

Where date is my date field and the format is YYYY-MM-DD (that may not give the correct output format for you, it's an example, look up the scheme want in the MySQL manual).

stretchy

Wow, thank you all for the responces,

I am new to PHP and did search the php reference site, but got really confused... I'm from an ASP(VBScript).

Thanks again, a great starting point.

Stretch