Pass datepicker value to PHP & MySQL

jrahma

Hi,

I have the attached new_leave.php file which has dateFrom and dateTo datepickers.

When submitting the form I don't get the correct MySQL format therefore it's throwing an error.

The value I get is something like this:

1423900800

that's when I try:

echo $timestamp = strtotime($_POST['dateFrom']);

can you help please...

new_leave.zip

Weedpacket

Don't you hate it when you do research into which datepicker to use and the one you decide on turns out not to have any documentation?

But if the date picker has no functionality to set the date format it uses, see [man]date[/man].

sneakyimp

Sounds to me like you are having your first encounter with the Unix Timestamp concept. Basically, all kinds of date-related operations generate and/or accept as parameters an integer value that corresponds to the number of seconds that have passed in the 'linux epoch.' More precisely, the number of seconds (or milliseconds) that have passed since January 1, 1970. You might want to also check out Javascript's Date.Now() function. It returns a similar value.

This returned value does in fact correspond to a specific date. Check out the date function as Weedpacket suggested:

echo date("Y-m-d H:i:s", 1423900800);

The output is:

2015-02-14 00:00:00

Bonesnap

If you are using the datepicker from jQueryUI, it indeed has an option to set the date format, which I always use to format into the MySQL accepted date format. It also has the ability to set a secondary or alternate date format (if the front-end must follow a certain format that differs from what you need).

Also, the reason you're getting a large integer is because you're running the [man]strtotime/man function. What do you get if you don't run that? Personally I avoid storing dates as integers like the plague. Not only is the YYYY-MM-DD format far more informative at a quick glance, but both PHP and MySQL have a plethora of functions to manipulate dates and times (which work fully on the YYYY-MM-DD format).