Question

I am having a problem in mysql query, I have date saved in database in this format :

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:25:35 EDT

I want to sort the rows by date but this date format is not letting me do it. I have tried Date_FORMAT AND STR_TO_DATE function but couldn’t get it working, could you please help me solve this?

Answer 1

Assuming you’ve modified your tables so you’ve got the original date field (‘olddate’) and want to put the reformatted ‘native’ date into a new field (‘newdate’), then:

UPDATE yourtable
SET newdate = STR_TO_DATE(olddate, '%a, %e %b %Y %H:%i:%s')

however, MySQL does not store timezone information in its date/time fields, so you’d have to convert the EDT stuff to whatever TZ is desired (UTC?).

Once converted to native format, you’d do your sorting with:

SELECT ...
...
ORDER BY YEAR(newdate)