Question

I cannot seem to find any info on this..

I need to convert a string to a date so that it will import properly to an SQL DATE field. When I import 12/25/2012 to the DB, it appears as 0000-00-00.

What’s the proper way to do this?

Links and refs appreciated.

Answer 1

As @Ravi pointed out in his answer, MySQL accepts dates in the format YYYY-MM-DD. Quoted from 11.1.5. Date and Time Types¹:

Although MySQL tries to interpret values in several formats, date
parts must always be given in year-month-day order

For this, you can use str_todate()² function to format it:

str_to_date('12/25/2012', '%m/%d/%Y);

SQL Fiddle Demo

This way, these input strings will be stored in your database as date objects(without any specific date format). Later, if you want to output these dates in a specific format you can use DATE_FORMAT³ to format it. Something like:

SELECT DATE_FORMAT(datefield, '%Y-%m-%d') FROM Test;
--2012-12-25

^{1, 2, 3: Links and refs, that you asked for.}