Question

I have dates as text strings in the format —

16 October 2012
08 October 2012
04 October 2012

I would like to convert them into a format that is MySQL ‘date’ friendly.

I have the following implementation —

$fixed = date("Y-m-d", strtotime($date));

Which returns all dates as —

1969-12-31

Answer 1

Aside from my other answer, where I use PHP date functions to obtain the result, if you want to avoid them and use a much faster approach for your particular case, you could use the following custom function:

function mysql_date($d) {
    $m = array('jan','feb','mar','apr','may','jun','jul','aug','sep','oct','nov','dec');
    $ex = explode(' ',$d);
    $mon = array_search( strtolower( substr($ex[1],0,3) ) ,$m) + 1;
    return $ex[2] . '-' . $mon . '-' . $ex[0];
}

$date='16 October 2012';
echo mysql_date($date); //echoes '2012-10-16'