Question

Hi guys my application parses text files where date values are stored in the format: DDMMMYYYY eg: 12MAR2009.

I noticed that inserting this value as it is into a database datetime value doesn’t work at all. How do I convert this into a datetime value which can be entered into a database. My application is in php.

Answer 1

$timestamp = strtotime("12MAR2009");

...

INSERT INTO my_table (..., timestamp) VALUES (..., FROM_UNIXTIME($timestamp))

The PHP function strtotime() will take almost any string containing a date/time value, and convert it to a unix timestamp.

The MySQL function FROM_UNIXTIME() will take a unix timestamp and convert it to MySQL’s datetime format.