human friendly dates...

svenski

I'm pulling a date out of a MySQL database that reurns a date in the format YYYY-MM-DD HH-MM-SS and for display purposes only (ie don't want to change the format it is stored in the databse) i want it to be a human friendly date, including day of the week, so a value of 2003-09-18 gets displayed as 'Thursday 18 Sept 2003'

This has come up before but the siggestion seemed to be to change the stored value, but unfortunatley that is not an option 🙁

Any help appreciated

superwormy

You DO NOT want to change the stored value, that is the appropriate way to store those values.

What you DO WANT, is these two functions:
www.php.net/strtotime
www.php.net/date

strtotime() will change your MySQL date into seconds since the Unix epoch, sometime in 1970. date() will then format that nice seconds value into whatever human-friendly format you want.

svenski

Ok thanks for the info, got it sorted now. For anyone else wanting to do this, the code i used was:

if ($row_Recordset['datetimefield']!=0)
{
$date = $row_Recordset['datetimefield'];
$stamp = strtotime ("$date");
echo date ("D F j, Y, g:i a",$stamp);
}
else
{
echo "No time scheduled";
}

Once again - cheers 4 the help 🙂

Joseph_Sliker

Dates have had me utterly mystified...I'm surprised I've been able to do as much as I have over the last few months because many of my tables and forms have required dates.

Anyway, this discussion really helped a lot. I have been trying to build an online calendar with a form that would allow users to update their schedules and simply could not get the date back into a form that the Update query would accept (the query ran, but the resulting value that ended up in the table was always "0000-00-00"

I was able to pare the code from the previous message down to this:

$formDATE = $HTTP_POST_VARS[formDATE];

$stamp = strtotime ($formDATE);

$xDATE = date ("Ymd",$stamp);

Using the resulting $xDATE in the update query did the trick! Thanks so much...I've been fooling around with this all day.

Duxie

Eye-C....
I'd RTM a few times with some serious glazing of the eyes.

Now it makes sense.
I tweaked it a little.. as I'm using a static date to pull against the db.
$today = "2003-10-27";
$stamp = strtotime ($today);
$nowday = date ("l, F jS, Y",$stamp);

Mahalo Nui Loa (thanks very much in Hawai'ian)