Dates

darkness

ive got various dates stored in a mysql database as YYYY-MM-DD and would like to view them as DD-MM-YYYY
I think i need to use strtotime() but cant find very good reference on how to use it, could someone please explain how to use it or another function which i may be able to use

yendor

I've used strtotime() a few times and it seems you have to have a date and time to get a correct timestamp, don't fear however you can convert them by declaring a function like this

function convertdate($datevar)
{
$exp = explode("-",$datevar)
$new_date = "$exp[2]-$exp[1]-$exp[0]"
return($newdate);
unset($new_date);
}

you could put this in a seperate file called date_convert.php or something and include it.
include("path/date_convert.php");

or you could just put it in with your current code. Either way all you need to do is call the function.

$date = convertdate($date_from_database);

The new variable $date should be in DD-MM-YYYY format! See dates really aren't that hard.

Rodney

yendor

Sorry I got ahead of myself and forgot a few semicolons.The following lines ar corrected.

$exp = explode("-",$datevar);
$new_date = "$exp[2]-$exp[1]-$exp[0]";

Rodney

darkness

But for this wont i need the date stored in the table in the colums, 1 for year, the next for month and the last for day?

yendor

Darkness wrote:

But for this wont i need the date stored in the table in the colums, 1 for year, the next for month and the last for day?

No! The explode() functions works like this.
Say you have a variable set to a date.

$date = "2001-11-03";

The explode function breaks the data wherever there is a "-"(or whatever you specify) and creates an array.

Like this:

$exp = explode("-",$date);

Will create an array called $exp, or whatever you name it.
Therefore:
$exp[0] will equal "2001"
$exp[1] will equal "11"
and $exp[2] will equal "03"

Then you can simply rearrange the variables in the order you desire.

$new_date = "$exp[2]-$exp[1]-$exp[0]"

Which in this case will be 03-11-2001, or DD-MM-YYYY. This is really just string manipulation not date conversion, but it works quite nicely. I often use it to convert from MySQL YYYY-MM-DD to the preferred format MM/DD/YYYY. Of course you could do it with your MySQL select statment, but I can't remember the MySQL functions off the top of my head!

Rodney