time stamps

[jpratt]

I am storing date/time formatted like this:

 

04-23-2008 12:00

 

I have the following code to output a string as a date. My ultimate goal it to find differences between dates and split them based on appointments made. I have the following code:

 

$timestr = "04-23-2008 11:00";
echo date('m-d-Y h:i', strtotime($timestr));

 

My only problem is it returns 12-31-1969 05:00, not the date/time given it. How do I convert the string to a timestamp to work with and get the correct date/time? Thanks.

[craygo]

if you are going to use dates in a database you should be storing the values as a date, datetime, or timestamp, not a string. That being said, the strtotime function doesn't do well when you use dashes with the year being last. It works fine with 2008-04-23 but not the way you have it.

 

try this instead

$timestr = str_replace("-", "/", "04-23-2008 11:00");
echo date('m-d-Y h:i', strtotime($timestr));

 

Ray

[jpratt]

Thanks, works great! I did not know strtotime had this problem.

 

Im working on a function that splits the times based on a selected time. The time will ultimately be stored as datetime in a mysql db. Thanks for the help.

[PFMaBiSmAd]

strtotime does not understand mm-dd-yyyy. If you had used slashes mm/dd/yyyy it would have worked.

 

If these are stored in a database, you should be using a standard DATETIME data type: yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM:SS Doing so will allow you to directly sort, compare, and perform date calculations using about 20-30 mysql date and time functions. You can output a standard DATETIME data type using the mysql DATE_FORMAT() function in any format you want.

 

With a mm-dd-yyyy format, you cannot directly do any of these things and the code necessary will result in slow operations over using a standard mysql format.