Question

When I make projects on my website, I’ve saved the time and date that I made them on in MySQL as ‘2012-02-27 12:32:36’ format.

How can I get this to display as:

“February 27, 2012 12:32 p.m.”?

I’ve looked at other date formatting on PHP and read on the PHP website, but all of the functions they provide don’t seem to be for grabbing a date in the format that I’ve saved it in.

Answer 1

First, convert the MySQL DateTime string you have into a DateTime object by using DateTime::createFromFormat()

$mysqlDateTime = '2012-02-27 12:32:36';
$date = DateTime::createFromFormat('Y-m-d H:i:s', $mysqlDateTime);

Then, simply call DateTime->format() with the desired format string:

$formattedDate = $date->format('F j, Y g:i a');

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You can also use the MySQL UNIX_TIMESTAMP() date function (to extract a unix timestamp compatible with date()) or use strtotime(), however note that these methods do not support dates after January 19, 2038 on 32-bit systems due to overflow (the two methods do not support PHP’s automatic number variables promotion).