Question

Within my CodeIgniter app, I’m using a Jquery calendar pop-up that also captures time as set by the user, so the end result looks like: MM-DD-YYYY HH:MM, and I’m storing this in MySQL into a DateTime field that is: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS. What is the best (most efficient) way to push the date/time into MySQL so that it saves properly, and to pull is back out of MySQL and render it on the screen in the reverse format? Thanks!

Answer 1

Most efficient way is to use the ISO 8601 standard to pass date values between the client and server. Since the client and server talks in strings you’d be parsing the date to a string before sending it either way. The best format I prefer is the combined date and time in UTC:

2011-06-14T13:57Z

There are no spaces and it’s clean. Then you’ll have to parse it on the server side (should be relatively easy using PHP) and parse it on the client side.

For displaying purposes, I prefer to extend JavaScript’s Date.prototype to include a format function that imitates PHP’s date format.

Once you include the linked script from above you could do this on the server side –

var today = new Date();
alert(today.format('m-d-Y H:i')); //displays "06-14-2011 11:18"

Good luck!