date from variables

mistafeesh

I'm trying to display a date from some data in a MySQL database. There are variables for day, month and year. At the moment, I've sort of done it manually. I tried using mktime, but got rather random results.

here's what I've got at the moment:

<?php 
  #month code
  $monthname = array( 1 => "January", 2 => "February", 3 => "March", 4 =>
 "April", 5 => "May", 6 => "June", 7 => "July", 8 => 
"August", 9 => "September", 10 => "October", 11 => "November", 12 => "December");
echo $monthname[$row_event['month']]

  ?>
  &nbsp;<?php echo $row_event['day']; ?>,&nbsp;&nbsp;<?php echo $row_event['year']; ?>

can anyone tell me how to use a proper date function to siplay the data so I can format it more nicely?

PS the above code is a mixture of Dreamweaver MX generated and my dodgy coding!

tserbis

Use DATE_FORMAT in MySQL.

mistafeesh

I can't change the way the SQL works without causing other problems. It's pulling data in from a SQL database made for a PHP calendar. I've just added some new things for the site, such as the ability to list occurences of a particular course, and a custom event description page. If I change the SQL, then I'll have to mess with the calendar code more, and I really don't want to do that.

So I'm stuck with the three variables from the database - $day (2 digit), $month(2 digit) and $year (4 digit).

can't I generate a nice looking date from those?

Shrike

yep...something like

date("d m, D", strtotime($yourdatestring));

sorry can't remember date formatter exactly 🙂

However if you are running the SQL query yourself you can probably make MySQL spit you the dates in whatever format you need.

mistafeesh

thanks. I'll give it a shot.

portaloo

$query = 'SELECT Name, DATE_FORMAT(VisitTime, '%m.%d, %H:%i:%s') as vtime FROM STATS';

%Y: Long year (2002)
%M: Long month (August, September)
%m: Numeric month (08, 09)
%d: Day of the month (01)
%W: Long day of the week (Monday, Tuesday)
%a: Short day of the week (Mon, Tue)
%H: Hour (01, 02)
%i: Minute (01, 02)
%s: Second (01)

i always use datetime as the datatype for dates. i tried playing with making strings dates but this just caused too many headaches.