Formatting timestamp dates retrieved from MySQL

Date formatting has always been ugly, and the MySQL timestamp returns a yyyymmdd, rather than the mmddyyyy used by the PHP date formatting functions. Is there an alternative to this, rather ugly, extraction and formatting to get yyyy-mm-dd rather than a tight yyyymmdd? I know I could do the formatting in the "select", but as the number of fields we may wish to fetch may vary, I'm happier sticking with the "*" at present. Here's the ugly code, dtAuctionStart is one of several timestamp fields: $sql = "SELECT * FROM item order by cItemId"; $result = mysql_query($sql,$db); if ( mysql_num_rows( $result) ) { //bunch of table formatting stuff while ($myrow = mysql_fetch_array($result)) { // table formatting stuff surrounds this ... echo substr( $myrow[dtAuctionStart], 0, 4), "-"; echo substr( $myrow[dtAuctionStart], 4, 2 ), "-"; echo substr( $myrow[dtAuctionStart], 6, 2 ); } } Thanks for looking - Miles Thompson