echo php date

[ianhaney50]

I am getting the data storing as yyyy-mm-dd in the database now which is good but can't work out how to echo the data as dd-mm-yyyy format on the candidates profile php page

 

I currently have the following

echo "Date of Birth: " . $row ['dob'];

I have tried a few ways but can't remember what they were now as few diff ways

[fastsol]

echo "Date of Birth: " . date("d-m-Y", strototime($row ['dob']));

[fastsol]

I also hope that you are storing the date in the db in a DATE appropriate data type for the field. Something like DATE or DATETIME or TIMESTAMP

[ianhaney50]

I just sorted it using the following in my SELECT query, also sorry yeah am storing date as date type in the database

, DATE_FORMAT(dob, '%e %M %Y') as dob

Edited July 14, 2015 by ianhaney50

[scootstah]

Another way is this:

SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(dob) as dob
...
echo date('d-m-Y', $row['dob']);

This will cause MySQL to return a UNIX timestamp of your DATE field, and then PHP can format it with date().

 

It's useful if you have standardized date formatting logic and don't want to add the format to every single query.

[mac_gyver]

unfortunately, for things like dates of birth, the abomination leftover from the 1970's, known as a unix timestamp, is not appropriate.

 

under mysql, any date earlier than 1970-01-01 00:00:00 results in a zero (all current mysql versions) and depending on your php version and operating system, php date()/strototime() are either limited to 1970-01-01 00:00:00 or 1901-12-13 20:45:54.

 

also, using a unix timestamp requires a conversion that is time zone dependent and is lossy because the mapping is not one-to-one in both directions due to DST.

 

using the mysql DATE_FORMAT() however only involves changing the format of the value, not converting it to/from a different number system and avoids all these problems. the php date/time class doesn't have these problems either.

[scootstah]

You raise good points. It all depends what you're doing, I suppose. I've been mainly working on backend services for quite a while now, so I like to just return a UNIX timestamp and let the client figure out how they want it formatted.

[Barand]

 

I just sorted it using the following in my SELECT query, also sorry yeah am storing date as date type in the database

, DATE_FORMAT(dob, '%e %M %Y') as dob

Sorting on that formatted value won't work, for the same reason we don't store like that in the first place. Use the formatted version for your output but you need

ORDER BY dob