Date Format Conversion

[lyndonw]

I'm pulling some info from various XML files and am having problems converting the following date format so that it can be stored as a DATETIME field in a MySQL database.

 

Tuesday,17 August 2010 09:25:00

 

This obvious newbie would appreciate a shove in the right direction...  Thanks in advance 

[shlumph]

Use strtotime() to convert Tuesday,17 August 2010 09:25:00 to a timestamp:

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php

 

Have a look at the date function to convert the timestamp into the correct format:

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

[disciple10]

This sounds like a job for DateTime::createFromFormat(). This function returns a timestamp returns a datetime value which date() can then use to generate the form that you want.

Tuesday,17 August 2010 09:25:00

This date is in the format l,j F Y H:i:s where

l (lowercase L) is the full name of the day of the week

j is the day of the month without leading 0's. use "d" instead if it is "01" etc

F is the full name of the month

Y is the 4 digit year

H is the 24-hour format number of hours with leading 0's

i is the number of minutes with leading 0's

s is the number of seconds with leading 0's

(a full listing of format strings can be found here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php)

 

To use this information with DateTime::createFromFormat

<?php $date = date_create_from_format('l,j F Y H:i:s', 'Tuesday,17 August 2010 09:25:00'); ?>

 

Now you must construct the format string for the new datetime field. Mysql stores datetime info in the format YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS. In PHP strings this would be "Y-m-d H:i:s" In order to get the datetime field you must plug the above into date() to get:

<?php
$datetime_value = date("Y-m-d H:i:s",$date);
?>

more information on the date() function can be found at the link above. More info on the DateTime function can be found here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.createfromformat.php

 

[lyndonw]

Thanks guys, I'll take a bash now...

[lyndonw]

Thanks guys - I used a mixture of both your advice after a few errors (I presume because the data was an object not a string):

 

     

            // Lets convert the date into a usable format..
            $date = strtotime((string) $data->StartTime);
            // And into a datetime friendly format
            $datetime_value = date("Y-m-d H:i:s", $date);

[shlumph]

Cool beans 

[disciple10]

Awesome