Converting a variable to date

[kellygrape]

I searched around for a bit and tried reading the documentation on the date function, but I think I'm missing something, and figured someone could probably answer this pretty quickly.

I'm coding a schedule creator for my school's television station. It's pretty basic (lots of forms and messy sql insertions).

The scheduling is done on a monthly basis, where every week in a month follow the same schedule.

For the schedule creation, I give the user the option of month and day from a drop-down selector. The values I have for these correspond to the selected month and day -- if the user were to choose January, the value stored would be 01, and if they chose Monday, the value stored would be 1.

I did this because I hope, in the future, to be able to compare the current date and time to the date and day stored so I can make a "playing now" function on my site. I have an idea of how I'm going to do that already, just comparing the values from the date() function...

But, how can I get the values 01 to read January and 1 to read Monday? Is there a way to do it without using an array?

Hope that made sense.

Thanks to anyone who answers. I appreciate the help.

[coreyp_1]

Check out the function notes at php.net/strtotime.
Specifically look at the function by:
codepanda at yahoo dot com on 24-Aug-2005 05:29
I think it is heading in the right direction.

[bbreslauer]

You could use date() and mktime() to do this. You would do

date('M',mktime(hour,minute,second,month,day,year))

where the M is whatever you want to display (see the php.net page for the date() function) and the mktime() follows the format above. You can get rid of any extraneous fields that are to the right of the last thing you need, but not to the left (for obvious reasons, I hope).