Question

I have a DateTime which I want to store in a Date MySQL column. I am using MySQLi and prepared statements.

When binding parameters, I cannot specify date as a type, only strings and integers.

How do I convert the DateTime to a MySQL date string representation? There is very little documentation on the DateTime class.

Answer 1

I almost closed this as a duplicate of Convert from MySQL datetime to another format with PHP but I think it’s actually the reverse problem. That question asked how to format a date fetched from MySQL, and you’re asking how to format a date for input to a query.

Option 1:

SELECT * FROM MyTable WHERE DateTimeCol = ? 

You can format the value to the YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM format MySQL wants:

<?php $mysql_date = date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $timestamp); ?> 

Then submit it as a string parameter to the query.

Option 2:

SELECT * FROM MyTable WHERE DateTimeCol = FROM_UNIXTIME(?) 

Then you can submit the timestamp value as a numeric parameter to the query.

Option 3:

SELECT * FROM MyTable WHERE DateTimeCol = STR_TO_DATE(?, '%m/%d/%y') 

You can submit a wide variety of string representations of date/time, if you specify the formatting to MySQL’s STR_TO_DATE() function. For the formatting codes, see the DATE_FORMAT() function.