formatting dates

drollz

Wow, I am extremely frustrated right now; hopefully you guys can help me out before I'm out of dishes and glasses to break and have to move onto harming pets.

I can't get my date to properly display. It is $birthday. It is formatted as a time stamp. Previouslu, I had it in yyyy-m-d format. Neither worked! The output I get from the code below is Age: 33 (December 31, 1969).

WHY???

$today = time();

$age= ($today - $birthday)/60/60/24/365.25;

$f_age = sprintf("%01.0d", $age);

echo "Age: $f_age ";

$f_birthday = date("F d, Y", $birthday);

echo "($f_birthday)<br>";

TheIceman5

using a lot of variables there, unnecessary for so many.
what is the actual value of birthday? have you printed it to screen to see? is it a number or string that looks like a number?

dalecosp

Have you considered that $birthdate and $birthday are not the same variable?

drollz

$birthday or $birthdate? You use both.

Yes. I found that mistake and corrected it, but still no luck. 🙁

drollz

Originally posted by TheIceman5
using a lot of variables there, unnecessary for so many.
what is the actual value of birthday? have you printed it to screen to see? is it a number or string that looks like a number?

1973-02-04

dalecosp

"1973-02-04" ($birthday) is not a timestamp. Date() expects a time stamp. Convert it using [man]strtotime/man and it will work.

drollz

I have done it both ways, actually, but with no luck.

Thanks for the help, guys, but I guess I'm not being clear. My birthdays are stored in variables taken from a MYSQL table column named birthday. How can I make this work? How should I store the birthday in MYSQL? How do I define the column?

PHP uses the following timestamp format, correct?: h,m,s,d,m,yyyy

But the MYSQL Timestamp column definition is: YYYYMMDDHHMMSS, is it not?

How do I define my MYSQL column as a timestamp that php can understand?

laserlight

In that case:

$mysql_time = "20030904121345"; //YYYYMMDDHHMMSS
$timestamp = mktime(
	substr($mysql_time, 8, 2),  //hour
	substr($mysql_time, 10, 2), //minute
	substr($mysql_time, 12, 2), //second
	substr($mysql_time, 4, 2),  //month
	substr($mysql_time, 6, 2),  //day
	substr($mysql_time, 0, 4)   //year
	);

but if you intend to use a Unix timestamp that PHP recognises, that why not simply store it as an INT field?

drollz

Okay, here's the status now:

Thank you VERY VERY much for the help, but I still can't get this to work!

This works, EXCEPT for people born before 1969! People born before 1969 are all listed as "Age: 33 ()". Even a guy with a 1961-06-14

To clarify: The variable in which the birthday is stored in yyyy-mm-dd format is called $birthday. Here is my code:

php:

$birthdate=strtotime($birthday);

$today = time();

$age= ($today - $birthdate)/60/60/24/365.25;

$f_age = sprintf("%01.0d", $age);

echo "Age: $f_age ";

$f_birthday = date("F d, Y", $birthdate);

echo "($f_birthday)<br>";
?>

LordShryku

That's because of a restriction in php on date().
From the PHP Manual...

Note: The valid range of a timestamp is typically from Fri, 13 Dec 1901 20:45:54 GMT to Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 GMT. (These are the dates that correspond to the minimum and maximum values for a 32-bit signed integer). On Windows this range is limited from 01-01-1970 to 19-01-2038.

Weedpacket

Y'know, seeing as how you're getting a MySQL timestamp out of MySQL and formatting it etc., it seems reasonable to ask why you aren't using MySQL's own Date and Time Functions. Like DATE_FORMAT. On that page are a bunch of user notes about calculating ages as well.

But here's an age calculation in PHP. Assuming you've got the $year, $month, and $day intact from the database...

list($this_year, $this_month, $this_day) = explode(' ',date('Y m d'));
$age = $this_year - $year;
if($this_month<$month || ($this_month==$month && $this_day<$day))
	$age=$age-1;

Edit: bug noted and corrected by planetsim

drollz

Originally posted by LordShryku
That's because of a restriction in php on date().
From the PHP Manual...

Note: The valid range of a timestamp is typically from Fri, 13 Dec 1901 20:45:54 GMT to Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 GMT. (These are the dates that correspond to the minimum and maximum values for a 32-bit signed integer). On Windows this range is limited from 01-01-1970 to 19-01-2038.

So where does this leave me?

But here's an age calculation in PHP. Assuming you've got the $year, $month, and $day intact from the database...

thanks for the effort, but that doesn't help at all. Can you try to explain it a little more for a beginner/ idiot?

Weedpacket

Originally posted by drollz
thanks for the effort, but that doesn't help at all. Can you try to explain it a little more for a beginner/ idiot?

laserlight has given some code for this, or you could use three DATE_FORMAT calls in the MySQL query to get the year and month and day separately

DATE_FORMAT() as year, DATE_FORMAT() as month()...

and I'm not filling in the contents of the DATE_FORMAT function because I don't have www.mysql.com handy right now.