How to reformat date in PHP?

Question

I am pulling the dates of various posts from a database. The dates are in the following format:

2009-08-12

Numeric Year - Numeric Month - Numeric Day

How can I reformat these dates to something more user friendly like:

August 12, 2009

Numeric Month Numeric Date, Numeric Year

Assuming that the date gotten from the mysql database is stored in a variable called:

$date = $row['date_selected'];

Answer 1

$new_format = date("Your Date String", strtotime($date));

See:
- http://php.net/strtotime
- http://php.net/date

Basically, if strtotime() can read it correctly, you can reformat it anyway you please.

In this case, Year - Month - Day is a properly recognized strtotime() format, this might not be the case for other formats.

Answer 2

date("F d, Y", strtotime($input))

Answer 3

Unlike the strtotime based examples, this allows you to ensure the month and day are interpreted in the correct order regardless of locale settings specified on the server.

$date = DateTime::createFromFormat('Y-m-d', '2009-08-12');
$output = $date->format('F j, Y');

Answer 4

<?php
echo date('F j, Y', strtotime($date));

Answer 5

You might want to look at the php function strtotime:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php

It'll parse a large number of date representations to a Unix timestamp.

Then use the date function.

Answer 6

Use it like this:
// February 1, 2005
print date ("F j, Y", mktime (0,0,0,14,1,2004));

Answer 7

Using strtodate or explode to split the date into its different components, you can then use the date function with the appropriate format string:http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

$date = "2009-08-12";
list($year,$month,$day) = explode("-",$date);
$formattedDate = date("F d, Y", mktime(0,0,0,$month,$day,$year));

Outputs: "August 12, 2009"

Answer 8

You might consider doing your date formatting in MySQL with your select statement:

DATE_FORMAT(date,'%M %e, %Y') as date_selected

http://www.w3schools.com/sql/func_date_format.asp