PHP converting date format

Question

Duplicate

• Managing date formats differences between PHP and MySQL
• PHP/MySQL: Convert from YYYY-MM-DD to DD Month, YYYY?
• Format DATETIME column using PHP after printing
• date formatting in php

Dear All,

I have a PHP page where i wil be displaying some data from Mysql db. I have 2 dates to display on this page.In my db table, Date 1 is in the format d/m/Y (ex: 11/11/2002) and Date 2 is in the format d-m-Y (ex : 11-11-2002) I need to display both of this in the same format .The format i have stored in a variable $dateFormat='m/d/Y'

Can any one guide me

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You should be all set with this:

echo date($dateFormat, strtotime($date1));
echo date($dateFormat, strtotime($date2));

Answer 2

Use strtotime to convert the strings into a Unix timestamp, then use the date function to generate the correct output format.

Since you're using the UK date format "d/m/Y", and strtotime expects a US format, you need to convert it slighly differently:

$date1 = "28/04/2009";
$date2 = "28-04-2009";

function ukStrToTime($str) {
    return strtotime(preg_replace("/^([0-9]{1,2})[\/\. -]+([0-9]{1,2})[\/\. -]+([0-9]{1,4})/", "\\2/\\1/\\3", $str));
}

$date1 = date($dateFormat, ukStrToTime($date1));
$date2 = date($dateFormat, ukStrToTime($date2));

Answer 3

If for some reason strtotime will not work for you, could always just replace the offending punctuation with str_replace.

function dateFormat($date) {
$newDate = str_replace(/, -, $date);
echo $newDate;
}

echo dateFormat($date1);
echo dateFormat($date2);

I know this will make most folks cringe, but it may help you with formatting non-date strings in the future.

Answer 4

You may want to look into the strptime function. This can convert any date from a string back into numeric values. Unlike strtotime, it can be adapted to different formats, including those from different locales, and its output is not a UNIX timestamp, so it's capable of parsing dates before 1970 and after 2037. It may be a little bit more work though because it returns an associative array though.

Unfortunately it's not available on Windows systems either so it's not portable.