funky date returned

Mandakins

I have a datetime field ($expdate) where I am storing an expiration date in this format:
2004-03-23 16:36:23
(this is the current value for $expdate)

When I use the following to format the date to make it 'prettier':
Your listings will expire on <? echo date('l, F jS, Y',$expdate);?> at <? echo date('g:i a',$expdate); ?>.

I get this:
Your listings will expire on Wednesday, December 31st, 1969 at 6:33 pm.
:eek:

What am I missing? I've also tried using the strftime() function but get the same results, only less pretty.
All I can think of is that it must be pulling the parts of the date in the wrong order.

any ideas?? suggestions??

rgermain

I could be wrong, but I would try strtotime()

see if that helps.

Mandakins

Oddly, that gives me this:

Your listings will expire on -1 at -1.

Moonglobe

no, he means replace $expdate in your code with strtotime($expdate)

but if it's returning -1, that's no good... must be and invalid date syntax. 😕

Mandakins

Oh oh oh! Like this:

Your listings will expire on <? echo date('l, F jS, Y',strtotime($expdate));?> at <? echo date('g:i a',strtotime($expdate)); ?>.

WORKS!!! Thank you!!!!! 😃

weekender

a little explanation for the geeks here...

[man]date[/man] takes as it's date argument a unix timestamp - this is the number of seconds since the beginning of the unix epoch (jan 1st 1970 00:00).

like any good function, if you pass date an incompatible data type (like a string), it will return false, or -1.

this is something towards why your date call is returning december 31st 1969 - although i'm not sure why it's not 11:59pm

Weedpacket

Originally posted by weekender
this is something towards why your date call is returning december 31st 1969 - although i'm not sure why it's not 11:59pm

If the string is "2004-03-23 16:36:23", then casting that to an integer (since that's what date expects for its second argument) it would become 2004. echo date('l, F jS, Y \a\t g:i a', 2004) gives - well, the exact result depends on your timezone. I get "Thursday, January 1st, 1970 at 1:33 pm", which is about 2004 seconds after 1970-01-01 00:00:00 GMT.

Cheers

Your original format looks very much like a mysql datetime field...

If so, I'd use DATE_FORMAT in your MySQL statement and it will come straight from MySQL all pretty.

Much easier.

😉

Moonglobe

or UNIX_TIMESTAMP it in the SELECT, then you don't need strtotime()