format date in mysql or php?

jylyn

Where I'm from, it's the middle of summer and nice and toasty warm (now that I've made all you northern hemisphereans jealous, I'll continue...)

Where I'm from, we also write the date in a different format to most people, ie today's date would be written 27.01.04 rather than 01.27.04 or whatever the rest of the world outside my front door considers normal.

I'm trying to get my web pages to recognise this fact, but I don't really know where to start!

Can I somehow change the default "date" setting in my MySQL column so the dates are stored correctly in my database or do I need to get PHP to figure it out?

If so, how do I format a date that arrives in PHP as a variable from the database, eg $dateDone = ...?

I admit I don't really know what I'm doing, but I can only seem to get PHP to format today's date, which isn't particularly useful in this context.

Help anyone?

zhabala

You can use DATE_FORMAT() function in yours SELECT stamenets like this:

SELECT DATE_FORMAT(column_name,'%d.%m.%Y) FROM table_name;

Zdenek

for aditional information see
http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Date_and_time_functions.html

jylyn

Awesome, thanks for your help. 🙂