Question

I have a form with a jQuery datepicker. I have set the date format to the European way: dd-mm-yy in order to make it look nice for the user. However this date value eventually needs to be formatted back in PHP to yy-mm-dd so that in can be stored in my mysql DATE field. Here is my code:

Jquery:

   $("document").ready(function(){

    $(function() {
    $( ".datepicker" ).datepicker({
        monthNames: ['januari', 'februari', 'maart', 'april', 'mei', 'juni',
                     'juli', 'augustus', 'september', 'oktober', 'november', 'december'],
        dayNamesMin: ['Zo', 'Ma', 'Di', 'Wo', 'Do', 'Vr', 'Za'],
        dateFormat:'dd-mm-yy',
        });
});

Answer 1

You have three options (in some vague order of preference):

1. Use MySQL’s STR_TO_DATE() function to convert the string:

   INSERT INTO ... VALUES (STR_TO_DATE(:date, '%d/%m/%Y'))
   

2. Convert the string received from jQuery into a PHP DateTime object:

   $dt = DateTime::createFromFormat('d/m/Y', $_POST['date']);
   

   and then either:

   • obtain a suitable formatted string:

     $date = $dt->format('Y-m-d');
     

   • obtain the UNIX timestamp:

     $timestamp = $dt->getTimestamp();
     

     which is then passed directly to MySQL’s FROM_UNIXTIME() function:

     INSERT INTO ... VALUES (FROM_UNIXTIME(:timestamp))
     

3. Manually manipulate the string into a valid literal:

   $parts = explode('-', $_POST['date']);
   $date  = "$parts[2]-$parts[1]-$parts[0]";