Question

i’m having trouble getting the date to be imported into mysql from my form.

my form is validated so that the input will always be dd/mm/yyyy

i’m currently using

$date = date('Y/m/d', strtotime($_POST['night_attending']));

this takes the value from the form and assigns it the year/month/day

the problem is that its reading my form as mm/dd/yyyy

i can swap the code to ‘Y/d/m’ which will put it into my database the right way round but it will stop working if the day is past the 12th as it still believes that it is the month

i have tried using

date_default_timezone_set('Europe/Dublin');

and

date_default_timezone_set('Europe/London');

but it makes no difference

i’m contemplating just using the mm/dd/yyyy format on my form, but this isn’t great as it’s a uk site.

has anybody encountered this problem? i’m sure it must be comman and there must be a simple answer that i’m missing.

thanks

alsweet

Answer 1

There is no means to set MySQL’s date format – the options exist, but they aren’t enforced/used.

I don’t recommend storing the dates as VARCHAR in order to maintain your format — use the MySQL format, and work with MySQL date functions (IE: STR_TO_DATE, DATE_FORMAT) to output the format you want for screen.

Be aware that dates will be dependent on the timezone of the host MySQL is on – you might want to consider using epoch timestamps instead, depending on your needs.