[Resolved] How to convert numeric date variable into string

sunshine66

Hi,

I have several MySQL fields of type "Date".

I use $month $day $year variables from an HTML form to udpate the date fields in database like this:

$date='$year$month$day';

This is the okay part.

I've done a ton of research, but I cannot seem to figure out how to:
1) convert the numeric $month variable into a string and
2) drop the leading zero of the $day variable.

ex:
$month = "1";
$month = date("F"); // returns current month "September" instead of "January"

I've been looking all over and I can't figure out a simple way to convert the numeric date to a string format other than using IF statements
if ($month=="1") {$month="January";} //etc.

Similarly, the date("j") function uses today's day rather than my variable day.

Can you help me?

drawmack

<?php
$months = array(' ','January','Feburary','March',...,'December');
$monName = $months[$month];
?>

TheDefender

date("F") uses the current date and time, since you didn't define a specific date and time... Same thing when you do date("j") without specifying the date in the [man]date[/man]]() function. In order to do what you are trying to do, you 'd do something more like this (If you don't want to use arrays like drawmack is showing you):

$month = 1;
$day = 5;
$year = 2004;
$date = $year."-".$month."-".$day;
$wordmonth = date("F", strtotime($date));
echo $wordmonth;
// Outputs January


$variableday = date("j", strtotime($date));
echo $variableday;
// Outputs 5

Note - This will not work with dates prior to Janyuary 1, 1970 since it uses the [man]strtotime[/man] function. Refer to this page for information on the types of date formats accepted by the strtotime function.

sunshine66

Thank you both so much!!!!
You've been great help!