How can I select the first "x" characters of a string

[narked]

How can I select the first "x" characters of a string.

I need to do this because I want to take a timestamp that looks like this:

$timestamp = 20032802

and I want to convert it to this:
$year = 2003 , $month = 28 , $day = 02

how can I select the first four characters of the string an put them in another string. then select the 5th and 6th character and put them in another string and finally the last two characters and do the same.

Thanks for your help

[cgraz]

use substr()

If you're pulling out of a database, you may also want to look into mysql commands such as DATE_FORMAT

Don't know what you're doing, but if you want PHP to do that, use the substr() function

Cgraz

[narked]

I First tried to use the DATE format in MySQL but when the default is 000-00-00 so it dot works for me. I want that in the moment of creating a new row the time column updates automaticaly with the current date, and thats why I using timestamp.

Is there a way to use the DATE format and do what Im tryng to do?

can I get an examplo of the sbstr function?

[cgraz]

Did you click the link I gave you? It has plenty of examples:

$rest = substr("abcdef", 1);    // returns "bcdef"
$rest = substr("abcdef", 1, 3); // returns "bcd"
$rest = substr("abcdef", 0, 4); // returns "abcd"
$rest = substr("abcdef", 0, 8); // returns "abcdef"

I'm still not understanding what you want to do with the timestamp, but here's how to extract the year, month, and day into seperate variables using date_format

$query = mysql_query("SELECT DATE_FORMAT(column_name, '%Y') AS year, DATE_FORMAT(column_name, '%m') AS month, DATE_FORMAT(column_name, '%d') AS day FROM your_table");

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)) {
  echo "Year: " . $row["year"] . "<br>";
  echo "Month: " . $row["month"] . "<br>";
  echo "Day: " . $row["day"] . "<br><br>";
}

Cgraz