Converting Date/Time Formats

Megahertza

At the moment i use mysql Timestamp funtion to automatically note when I have created a new news story. Problem is, this is not the most user friendly way of displaying time to non-tech pll. The date/time is outputted like this.

2006-02-18 18:48:49
// YYYY-MM-DD HH-MM-SS

How would i go about making it look more like this.

02:18:06 6:48 PM
// MM-DD-YY HH:MM AM/PM

Most of my visitors will be australian and we order the date differently to other countries.

jmrouleau

Read This

So use something like:

$stamp = '#####'; //Timestamp for some time January 1st 2006
$date = date('l,F j Y', $stamp);

$date would come out like 'Sunday, January 1 2006'

Drakla

mysql also has the DATE_FORMAT function that you can use to pull it out in the require style. You can also pull it out as a unix timestamp which is nice and easy for php to deal with when you use date() like above.

SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(yourcolumn) AS tstamp

niroshan

Hi,
Well I think what you should do is store the date and time according to the mysql specifications and when ever you display the datetime in the PHP file use PHP`s date funtion and format it what ever the format you want.

well when you inserting data you can use something like,

$sql="INSERT INTO tablename(fieldname) VALUES ('".date("Y-m-d H:i:s")."')";

When u r displaying the date, keep a global variable which will hold the display pattern and use the date function as below to get your result,

FYI: Global variable will help you to change the whole web sites date format incase, if you need to change the date pattern later on.

$globalVariable="m:d:y G:i A";

$sql="SELECT fieldname FROM tablename";
$row=mysql_query($sql) or die ("Error in the query");
$result=mysql_fetch_array($row) or die ("Error in getting the value");

$dbDate=$result['fielsname'];
print date($globalVariable,$dbDate);

Hope this is what you want. 🙂

Good luck

Regards,
Niroshan