Question

After spending over 6 hours trying to do this and trying many different published solutions I am just going to ask the exact question.

I want to have the user enter the date and time in US format in an html form. Format for today is 12/16/2012 02:53 using 24 hour time format.

Lets call it start_date.

Then I want to insert the record including the start_date into an mysql database into a datetime type field.
I am using PHP 5.2. Many of the solutions I saw required 5.3 and none of the workarounds for 5.2 worked.

Can someone please give me an exact example.
Thank you.

Answer 1

You asked for an example, which no one has supplied yet, so here it is:-

$start_date = date("Y-m-d H:i:s", strtotime("12/16/2012 02:53"));
echo $start_date;

Output:-

2012-12-16 02:53:00

This format matches the MySql DateTime type.

See working example here which also demonstrates that it works in PHP 5.2.

See the manual for strtotime and date.