Question

Trying to convert standard time variable from form input to TIME format acceptable for MySQL INSERT. I might be going about it all wrong and could use some help. I’ve read through the MySQL TIME functions and PHP TIME functions but haven’t found a solution yet.

Here’s what I’ve tried as an example:

<?php
$time_input = '11:00 AM';

$strtotime = strtotime($time_input);

$mysql_time = date('H:m:s',$strtotime);

echo "<p>time_input: $time_input</p>";
echo "<p>strtotime: $strtotime</p>";
echo "<p>mysql_time: $mysql_time</p>";
?>

The result is changing the time to 11:08:00 (not sure where the 8 minutes is coming from):

time_input: 11:00 AM

strtotime: 1344438000

mysql_time: 11:08:00

Any help is much appreciated!

Answer 1

DateTime will do this for you:

$time_input = '11:00 AM';
$date = DateTime::createFromFormat( 'H:i A', $time_input);
$formatted = $date->format( 'H:i:s');

I typically avoid strtotime() when possible as it can be somewhat unpredictable.

You can see it work in this demo.