Using oracle dates in php

[adamgeorge]

Hello everyone.

I am using the TO_CHAR function to change the format of my date... but I can't seem to get it to work.

this is my select:
$selectquery = "select news_id, news_title, news_article, TO_CHAR(news_date,'d MONTH') from news";

I then try to go though the results like so and print the date among other things:
while (OCIFetchInto($statement, $data, OCI_ASSOC)){
print"$data[NEWS_DATE]";
}

but the date never comes out... I don't get it... if I remove the TO_CHAR function from my query, it's fine... but of course in the wrong format... hmmmmmmm

does anyone know what I could be doing wrong?

Thanks :-)

[Anon]

Is 'd MONTH' a valid Oracle format string? I haven't worked with Oracle in awhile but I seem to remember that the format string were more like 'DD/MM/YYYY'.

I'd double check the way the TO_CHAR function works and what it's expecting.

[adamgeorge]

Hey Rob, thanks for replying... yeah... it is a valid oracle format string. but... I did mean to write 'dd MONTH'.

it ouputs the date in this format: '5 January'.

My select works fine in the sql plus console... um... so I think it must be a php coding error that I have...?

hmm... it's really bugging me though...

Although on an interesting note, 'd MONTH' outputs the date as well... just the day seems to be -5?? eg 'dd MONTH' = 11 January, 'd MONTH' = 6 January.

I thought that was weird...

anyways... thanks

[Anon]

Adam,

I just looked over your code again and I know what the problem is. If you run your code in sqlplus and look at the column headings you'll see that your to_char() column isn't news_date, it's something else that Oracle uses to denote that field. Add "AS news_date" to after the to_char() function call and everything should work just fine.

[adamgeorge]

Thanks Rob, it works now!

thanks a lot man, cya 🙂