Getting date from db field right?!?

jmansa

I have a db table where the field is varchar and in this field I have a date stored like this (20090402)... How can i split this up so it looks like this: 2009-04-02 or even better... 2009 april 2...

Thanks!

Weedpacket

The solution is: don't store the date like that. Store it as a proper date-type date.

Aside from that: [man]substr[/man] or maybe [man]strtotime[/man], and [man]date[/man].

But the preferred solution is still to fix the database.

SunsetKnight

I agree with jmansa, storing the date as a varchar is bad practice, and as you now noticed it takes additional code to parse the varchar. I would recommend storing the date as the "date" datatype. Which by default stores it as YYYY-MM-DD(MySQL), which you can just simply pull out of the database without needing any extra parsing code.

Any who, this is how you would parse the current date varchar:

$date = "20090402";
$year = substr($date,0,4);
$month = substr($date,4,2);
$day = substr($date,6);
echo $year . "-" . $month . "-" . $day;

This would produce:

2009-04-02

Refer to the following URL for more information on the php substr function:
http://www.w3schools.com/php/func_string_substr.asp

SunsetKnight

jmansa;10909668 wrote:
or even better... 2009 april 2...

$month_names = array("01" => "January",
					 "02" => "February",
					 "03" => "March",
					 "04" => "April",
					 "05" => "May",
					 "06" => "June",
					 "07" => "July",
					 "08" => "August",
					 "09" => "September",
					 "10" => "October",
					 "11" => "November",
					 "12" => "December"
					 );
$date = "20090402";
$year = substr($date,0,4);
$month = substr($date,4,2);
$day = substr($date,6);
echo $year . " " . $month_names[$month] . " " . $day;

This would produce:

2009 April 02

You can change the months to however you'd like, IE: Jan, Feb, Mar...

This would also work if you used the date data-type as has been recommended.

Cheers!