Re: Date Formatting

At 3:04 PM -0800 2/6/01, Richard Scott Crawford wrote:

Cold Fusion has a wonderful function called CreateODBCDate(), which takes as an argument any date in just about any format and returns a standard ODBC date format that you can plug into a database without worrying about conversion. Does PHP have a similar function? I've looked for one but can't seem to find it anywhere.

From http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php - "strtotime - Parse about any english textual datetime description into a UNIX timestamp" If the ODBC timestamp looks like yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss then you could do: $Date = '1 jan 2001'; ODBCDate = date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime($Date)); And if you really want, just define the function function CreateODBCDate($DateString) { return date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime($DateString)); } and you can ease your CF-PHP transition :) If you want to default to returning the current date: function CreateODBCDate($DateString='') { return ( $DateString ? date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime($DateString)) : date('Y-m-d H:i:s') ); } Sorry about the weird indent style --- I was trying to avoid wordwrapping. It doesn't specify in the docs, but I _assume_ strtotime() returns false if it can't figure out what the date string is...you might want to test that. - steve

-- Richard Crawford (mailto:rscrawford@mossroot.com) http://www.mossroot.com AIM Handle: Buffalo2K "Tomorrow, we'll seize the day and throttle it!" -Calvin

-- +--- "They've got a cherry pie there, that'll kill ya" ------------------+ | Steve Edberg University of California, Davis | | sbedberg@ucdavis.edu Computer Consultant | | http://aesric.ucdavis.edu/ http://pgfsun.ucdavis.edu/ | +-------------------------------------- FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper ---+