Date formatting

[NiallThistle]

I'm going round in circles with this one, but I have a feeling that the answer is obvious.  I have POST information that I want to use as a date and display it using date format, but I don't know how to

 

The POST data outputs the following: 2011-9-23

 

Assuming I have defined $date as the posted data from the previous form, how do I write some code to tell it to output it as September 23, 2011, or just Sept 2011?

[Xpluration]

Try this: http://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.createfromformat.php

[NiallThistle]

I was actually reading that very site about an hour ago.  Can't make head nor tail of it, in terms of context, how I should adapt what I have.

 

Essentially what I have just now is:

 

echo"$date";

 

And that outputs the basic SQL entry format of '0000-00-00'.

 

Can anyone suggest a basic way to write the line I wrote above, to add formatting to the date?

[Xpluration]

Does your date format have leading 0's for the day or month?

 

i.e. is it always 9 for September and not 09? If the day is 5, is it 5 or 05? So for September 5th 2011 will it be 2011-9-5? or 2011-9-05?

 

Also, what version of PHP do you have?

[NiallThistle]

Does your date format have leading 0's for the day or month?

 

i.e. is it always 9 for September and not 09? If the day is 5, is it 5 or 05? So for September 5th 2011 will it be 2011-9-5? or 2011-9-05?

 

Also, what version of PHP do you have?

 

PHP v4

 

The date could be anything, but the info is taken from three drop downs (day, month and year) in a form on the previous page.

[jcbones]

$time = strtotime($_POST['date']); //get timestamp;
$date = date('F d, Y',$time);

echo $date;

strtotime()

date()

[NiallThistle]

That's excellent, thank you very much.