Newbie question on date formatting

[Unprepared for PHP]

Hi,

I've tried googling around to find the answer to what I imagine is a fairly easy question, but nothing seems to have worked so far.

I'm running Apache, PHP and Access (mySQL didn't install correctly for some reason.)

In my Access DB, I have date fields, with various data in them, displaying in Access as:

e.g.: 31 March 1985

When I pull that out of the database by PHP, it displays it as:

e.g.: 1985-03-31 00:00:00

Someone suggested doing echo (date("j M Y", strtotime('dteDate'))); - but this just outputs 01 Jan 1970 to the screen.

I'm also having a similar problem with times, with DB contents being:

e.g.: 00:13:13

... but displaying on screen as:

e.g.: 1899-12-30 00:13:13

I'd like to display both of these in the format they exist in within the DB. If anyone can help I'd really appreciate it.

Cheers!

[dgiberson]

It depends on how you store the information in the database. Check the design view of the table to see how the data is stored, it sounds like you are storing the date in a Medium Date format. Change it to general date... essentially becomes a timestamp field, then you can use the date("<format here>", $date).

[Unprepared for PHP]

Thanks for this.

I have changed it to General Date, (and General Time for the second point). No change to the data displayed on screen yet.

[dgiberson]

Is the date in Access still showing as 1-Jan-07?

[Unprepared for PHP]

It now displays in Access as 31/03/1985 rather than 31 March 1985 as before. It still displays on-screen as 1985-03-31 00:00:00.
Time continues to display in Access as 00:13:13, but displays on-screen as 1899-12-30 00:13:13.

I am trying to get them to display as 31 March 1985 and 00:13:13.

Cheers.

[dgiberson]

So i take it, that you are having to different columns then? If you only require a single date/time i.e. 1/16/2007 00:13:13 store all that information in one field. then you can just format the field as you desire use: http://ca3.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php as a reference.

[Unprepared for PHP]

Thanks. I've seen this link before when I was originally investigating it, but I am having difficulty understanding how to pass the variable into the expression, as all the examples seem to refer to formatting the current date/time.

[dgiberson]

$date = query field from database.

echo date("%y-%m-%d", $date);