timestamp mayhem

[seanlyons]

I am really confused.

I am find it really hard to get some simple date info from mysql into a page.

I am aware that php and mysql look at timestamp data very differently, so how do I turn 0305041200 into 04.05.03 at 12.00?

I want to be able to select the date for an individual logged on user, identified by a session variable.

I have read through the php and mysql manual sections, and am aware of the UNIX_TIMESTAMP and date_format() functions, but dont know how to use them for this purpose!

Can anybody point me in the right direction?

[tsinka]

Hi,

you can use the date() function, e.g.

$timestamp="0305041200;

echo date("d.m.Y at H:i",$timestamp);

The date section in the php manual describes that a little bit deeper.

If you want to make a timestamp to display a certain date you can use mktimestamp to create that date and use the timestamp it returns to display that date with date().

Thomas

[seanlyons]

date() will try to convert the mysql timestamp as if it were a unix timestamp, and you end up with the date 19.01.2038.

I would like to know if there is

1. a way of converting a mysql timestamp (format yymmddhhmmss) to a format that php understands

or

2. is there a way using php to set the contents of a field to the date and time at a certain action, say an update?

I think 2 would actually be a better option.

[tsinka]

Hi,

you could either split the timestamp into its parts and use them on mktimestamp or even better you could use the UNIX_TIMESTAMP function of mysql, e.g.

SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(field) FROM ...

That would return that field as correct unix timestamp which you can directly use with date() 🙂