Time feature

jbachris

If I have a date and time input box in my news admin with the date and time displayed as:

6/16/2006 10:56:45 PM

How can I change it to TIMESTAMP format before entering into the database.

If I have:

<form>
<input type="text" name="date">
</form>

In the date input is the above date 6/16/2006 10:56:45 PM.

Then I have:

$sql = "INSERT INTO news(date) VALUES('" . $_POST['date'] . "')";
$add_news_rs = $conn->Execute($sql) or die ( $conn->ErrorMsg() );

How can I do this?

halojoy

there are quite a few small scripts at php.net
that is submitted in comments to date() and time() functions
and some of them deals with trying to make timestamp from a date string

the ONLY thing that should be entered into a MySQL timestamp field is the value of time()
then when wanting to display this, you can make a local date string in ANY FORMAT
but I guess you know this

you want to convert date to Unix timestamp
there is a function that try to do this [man]strtotime[/man]
[man]date[/man]
[man]time[/man]
hope you find some good snippets of php for it in examples at those links

jbachris

could i not use date_format()

halojoy

Question:
'6/16/2006 10:56:45 PM'

How can I change it to TIMESTAMP format

Use date_format() ?
well, you can try and I think you will get a message like:
'no such function' or 'function not defined'

these are all the functions php have to handle date/time:

checkdate -- Validate a Gregorian date
date_default_timezone_get -- Gets the default timezone used by all date/time functions in a script
date_default_timezone_set -- Sets the default timezone used by all date/time functions in a script
date_sunrise -- Returns time of sunrise for a given day and location
date_sunset -- Returns time of sunset for a given day and location
date -- Format a local time/date
getdate -- Get date/time information
gettimeofday -- Get current time
gmdate -- Format a GMT/UTC date/time
gmmktime -- Get Unix timestamp for a GMT date
gmstrftime -- Format a GMT/UTC time/date according to locale settings
idate -- Format a local time/date as integer
localtime -- Get the local time
microtime -- Return current Unix timestamp with microseconds
mktime -- Get Unix timestamp for a date
strftime -- Format a local time/date according to locale settings
strptime -- Parse a time/date generated with strftime()
strtotime -- Parse about any English textual datetime description into a Unix timestamp
time -- Return current Unix timestamp

see this page: http://php.net/manual/en/ref.datetime.php

Of course you can make your own function
to convert such date strings into UNIX TIMESTAMP:
'6/16/2006 10:56:45 PM'

And this is what you will have to do,
if you do not want to follow advice we give in previous posts.
Or maybe some nice poster here will do it for ....... it is not too difficult.
Having the information you got, it is all up to you.

Regards
halojoy
🙂

Installer

As I understand it, you have date/time input in the format:

6/16/2006 10:56:45 PM

and you want to convert it into a MySQL TIMESTAMP data type (not Unix timestamp) format:

06-16-2006 22:56:45

The easiest way, imo, is to use this:

$input = '6/16/2006 10:56:45 PM';  // Validity check bypassed for brevity.
$mysql_timestamp = date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime($input));

This will produce:

06-16-2006 22:56:45

which is a valid MySQL TIMESTAMP ready for inserting:

$sql = "INSERT INTO news(date) VALUES('" . $mysql_timestamp . "')";

Of course, it might be easier to have the request variable formatted that way in the first place. Then all you would need would be a validity check.