Question

<?php 
$firstdate = '2011-11-16';
$sample = date("d-m-Y", strtotime($firstdate)); 
echo $sample;
?>

I have a column in a table with date in this format 2011-11-16
But I need it in reverse, so I’ve used the following code.

The problem is that when the date is 0000-00-00, it prints 01-01-1970.
Is there a way of making it print 00-00-0000 instead? Please note that I’m looking to reverse it to British format. 00-00-0000.

Thanks

Answer 1

The problem is in the way dates are represented internally. They use what’s called Unix time, in which the date is represented as a number of seconds after the “Unix epoch”, which is 1/1/1970. This is why the date function (correctly) represents 0 (which is what strtotime returns when you pass it 0000-00-00) as Jan 1, 1970.

The only solution I can think of is something like this:

<?php 
$firstdate = '2011-11-16';
$sample = $firstdate == '0000-00-00' ? '00-00-0000' : date("d-m-Y", strtotime($firstdate)); 
echo $sample;
?>