Question

I need to enter dates and time(input as strings) into my database but there’s no change (remains as 0000-00-00 for the date and 00:00:00 for the time). I know I’m supposed to use DateTime::createFromFormat() but I’m not sure how to go about it. Please be patient and explain to me how I’m supposed to go about it and what is happening in each step and if I want to return the date from the database on later on, how will I go about it? I’m using $date and $starttime , $endtime.

Answer 1

While inserting, use STR_TO_DATE to convert your String date to Date or DATETIME based on the format as :

   INSERT INTO TABLE1(date, startTime, endtime) 
   VALUES (STR_TO_DATE('$date','%d/%m/%Y'),
          STR_TO_DATE('$starttime','%d/%m/%Y a%h:%i:%s'),
          STR_TO_DATE('$endtime','%d/%m/%Y a%h:%i:%s'));

Similarly use DATE_FORMAT during retrieval to convert into string of desired format as:

  SELECT DATE_FORMAT(date, '%d/%m/%Y') AS formatter_date,
         DATE_FORMAT(starttime,'%d/%m/%Y a%h:%i:%s') AS formatted_startTime
         DATE_FORMAT(endtime,'%d/%m/%Y a%h:%i:%s') AS formatted_endTime
  FROM TABLE1;

Let me know, if you need further explanation.