[RESOLVED] date help

OniLink

Hi,

No matter what I do, this doesn't seem to work properly:

// format date
list($year, $month, $day) = split('-', $row['dob']);
$date = mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, $day, $year);
$dob = date("dS M Y", $date);

No matter what date $row['dob'] equals, it always $dob always end up equalling: "31st Dec 1969"

$row['dob'] is in the format of yyyy-mm-dd

I'm guessing it has something to do with the mktime part, but I have used it in similar situations in the past and never had this trouble

Thanks for any help
~Oni.

rincewind456

I can't see anything wrong with that bit of code, it works fine for me that is if your certain that the dob format is YYYY-MM-DD. However if your retrieving the dob from a MySQL database then why not let it do the date formatting for you, you would get the same result with this

SELECT DATE_FORMAT('dob column', '%D %b %Y')as dob

OniLink

I figured out the problem. The dates are before 1970, so the mktime returns a negative value (not using PHP 5.01).

So I tried your method:
SELECT *, DATE_FORMAT("dob", "%D %b %Y") AS dob_full

but dob_full returns nothing?

bradgrafelman

Try using backticks (`) around the column name and single quotes (') around the string.

OniLink

bradgrafelman wrote:
Try using backticks (`) around the column name and single quotes (') around the string.

Cheers! That's it. Is it common practice to use ` for column names?

bradgrafelman

Eh, I'm sure there's differing opinions on that. I do only to ensure that MySQL interprets my database/table/column names correctly. Usually if you don't use any quotes at all (e.g. SELECT column FROM myTable) you'll be OK, but when you have weird characters (or use a reserved word or something like that for a column name) using backticks will avoid errors.