Question

If I have a string that represents the date and time such as ’30/09/2011 10:14′ which is a non-standard DATETIME format. Can I reformat this to a standard DATETIME format on insert into a DATETIME field in a MySQL database table?

I have tried this:

INSERT INTO test(lastdate) VALUES(DATE_FORMAT('30/09/2011 10:14', '%d/%m/%Y %H:%i'))

The result is NULL in the lastdate DATETIME field.

Answer 1

You can use str_to_date to convert for your insert :

INSERT INTO test(lastdate) values (str_to_date('30/09/2011 10:14',"%d/%m/%Y %h:%i"))

DATE_FORMAT is for translating a date / time field to another format on select