Unformatting a date after formatting it

Using the MySQL datetime column type I am storing the date/time a record was submitted. That works fine using something like:

$time = date("Y-m-d H:i:s");

The problem is that when I get the date out of the database I want to reformat it so it's more friendly on the eyes.

So basically I want to take the MySQL time and put it back into a format where date can properly handle it.

I tried:

$newtime = date("l F j, Y, g:i a", $time);

Which worked, except for the fact that it says the time is:

Thursday January 1, 1970, 7:56 am

And my system clock isn't that far off, lol!

And the DB correctly stored the date as 2001-04-02 19:47:28, sooo...

How would I take a MySQL DATETIME field and "unformat" it so date() can make sense of it?

Well, if you want to use date(), try this:

list($date, $time) = split(" ", $dateandtime);
list($year, $month, $day) = split("-", $date);
list($hour, $minute, $second) = split(":", $time);

$formatted_datetime = date("l F j, Y, g:i a", mktime($hour, $minute, $second, $month, $day, $year));

Hope that helps!

Chris King