Date formatting confusion

jjfletch

I have two fields on a form: Entry_Date and Expiration_Date, which I've formatted as so:

$entry_date = date("d-M-y")
$exp_date = date("d-M-y", strtotime("+14 days"));

I'd like to store these values in mysql, but I'm not sure how to set the mysql field as DATETIME and retain this format. I need to be able to keep mysql fields as DATETIME field, because certain records will be retrieved if it's within a specific timeframe (i.e., > NOW())

Can someone tell me how I can do this?

devinemke

the native DATE format in mySQL is YYYY-MM-DD. any dates that you want to put in the database must be formatted this way (using [man]date[/man]). you can always reformat them anyway you want on retrieval later using mySQL's DATE_FORMAT function.

jjfletch

I was afraid you were going to say that.

Do you know how I can format a date variable?

On my form, the values for the entry_date field and expiration_date field are set, as so:

$entry_date = date("d-M-y");
$exp_date = date("d-M-y", strtotime("+14 days"));


<!-- Here's the html portion --> 

<tr valign="top">
<td><b>Entry Date</b></td>
<td><? echo $entry_date; ?></td>
<td><b>Expiration Date</b></td>
<td colspan="2"><input type="text" name="expdate" value="<? echo $exp_date; ?>"></td>
</tr>

As you can see, the Expiration Date field is editable. If a user enters in 17-Feb-09, can you explain how I can reformat this field to the "Y-m-d H:i:s" format that mysql uses? And, for that matter, how I can reformat the $entry_date to match this pattern?