Re: Date confusion

Linda H wrote: > Hi, > > I must admit I am surprised at the paucity of date and time functions in > PHP. > > I have a date stored in a MySQL database in field of datatype date. PHP > doesn't seem to have a function I can use to format it for print. I > tried the following but regardless of the value in the date field, it > displays as 'Wednesday December 31, 1969' (I know this is the day > before the UNIX epoch.). > > echo '<p>'.date('l F j, Y',$start_date).'</p>'; > > I tried casting the field to datetime, but it didn't pass the parser. > Finally I did the following, which seems to work, but is awfully > convoluted: > > echo '<p>Date: '.date('l F j, > Y',strtotime($start_date).'</p>'; > > The other thing I'm concerned about is that strtotime takes the locale > into consideration. I don't want it adjusting the date - I just want it > printed out. > > Is there a better way to do this? If you have it in MySQL, there are a bunch of native MySQL functions to format it on the select itself. See http://mysql.com/datetime Or, if you want to manipulate it using PHP's functions, get MySQL to return it to you as a UNIX timestamp. -Rasmus