converting numbers into date() function...

[DoD]

Hi,

I currently plan to have my dates in a mmhhddMMyyyy format for storage in a database for a news script im making as all the 200 i sorted thru dont comply to my simple need, of changing the silly links in the headlines so i can keep everything within my site without it leaving to a news scripting...

Anyway, i would like to get a date function out of these numbers. For example. I would like to enter my format into a date() function and then out put something like 15 May 2002...

Also, im wondering how, with these records in a db, to get posts of a certian month.

Would be it best if i reversed it to yyyyMMddhhmm and pick the posts that are between yyyyMM000000 and yyyyMM999999

however, the only way i can do the MM+1 is to have it in the date function... so i can add en extra month on.

Or would a much better idea be i order by date with earilest first, pulling the month out of that(for a news archive function) and then increasing the month by one, and checking if there are any posts in that month? as i dont want it to go through every single news post.... as thats processing power and time...

I would need to forum a loop function for all the months. Asigning the month a number like is it mktime (seconds since unix started) and then stopping when its reached the current month... i think this would be best...

So for that... i would need a date() + xx months function, for it to output the dates...

Thanks for any help!

[benkillin]

here is a snippet from a blog script that has code in it that will convert numbers into the date:

<?
    // display blog
    $blogfile = file("blog.dat");

if (sizeof($blogfile) > 0)
{
    for ($i=sizeof($blogfile)-1; $i>=0; $i--)
    {
        list($name, $timestamp, $message) = split("\t", $blogfile[$i]);

        $date = date("F j, Y, g:i a", $timestamp);

        ?><font color="#FFFFFF"><table width="75%" border="0" bgcolor="#666666">
        <tr><td><? echo $name ?></td><td><div align="right"><? echo $date ?></div></td></tr>
        <tr><td colspan="2"><? echo rtrim($message) ?></td></tr>
        </table></font><?
    }
}
?>

here is the code that wrote the timestamp:

if (isset($_POST["submit"]))
{
    $name = str_replace("\t", " ", $_POST["name"]);
    $message = str_replace("\t", " ", $_POST["message"]);
    $message = str_replace("\n", "<br>", $message);
    $message = str_replace("\r", "", $message);

// write data
$fp = fopen("blog.dat", "a");
flock($fp, LOCK_EX);
fwrite($fp, $name."\t".time()."\t".$message."\n");
flock($fp, LOCK_UN);
fclose($fp);

header("Location: blog.php");
}

[DoD]

Thank you 🙂

That looks a little complicated to me, but ive been checking up on the mktime function...

which actually seems like what i need. Since it would also help me manipulate the dates. The only problem is that there is a bug with months of "08". I need to remove all leading "0"'s but not such as 20. Very frustrating...
Anyway, ive done some work...

$dateformat="G:i, jS \o\f F Y";

***$date obtained from database in hh/mm/dd/mm/yyyy form.***

$time = explode("/", $date);
$newtime = "$time[0],$time[1],00,$time[3],$time[2],$time[4]";
$time = date ($dateformat, mktime($newtime));

Which so far works wonderfully... not sure about this bug though but at least ive got it into the format i need... im happy 😃 i managed to do it on my own.

Thanks for spending the time to help!