Question

I am creating a mysql db with a php frontend. The data it will use is extracted from another larger db and contains a date/time field which looks like this – 20120301073136 – which records when an event happened.

I understand that this might be a UNIX timestamp? Not sure.

I want to be show this field in the tables in my PHP webpage as a readable date and time –

ie something like 01-Mar-2012 07:31:36 or similar

Should I try and convert it with SQL command or let PHP format it? And, what is the code to do so?

BTW, it is important that I can sort the data (in SQL and in the PHP table) into date order – ie in the order that these events happened.

Thanks in advance for your help – Ive learnt a lot here already

J

Answer 1

You can convert it to a datetime directly in your SQL query. Example:

select cast(20120301073136 as datetime)

You can also order that with no need to convert it since it is a number in the format YYYYMMDDHHmmss

select * from yourTable
order by yourDateTimeField