Question

I have a couple textboxes that allows a person to enter a time and date. The time is entered with a textbox for hours, a textbox for minutes, a drop down for am/pm and some drop downs for months/hours/years

So, I’d like to combine all of these to create a timestamp out of it and save it to the database.

But i’ve confused myself in how to do all that to create a proper timestamp, especially with the AM/PM part.

Answer 1

It sounds like you’d just use mktime(). Get the correct hour number by adding 12 for pm, then pass the arguments into the function.

if($is_pm) $hour += 12;
$time = mktime($hour, $minute, $second, $month, $day, $year);

If you’re looking for a MySQL timestamp instead of a UNIX timestamp, you have two options:

1. Build the timestamp in MySQL’s format using date(): date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $time);
2. Let MySQL do it for you: UPDATE table SET date = FROM_UNIXTIME($time) WHERE foo='bar'

Or you could just store the integer timestamp in the database as an integer.