Change format of Date field of MongoDB in php - php

Question

My collection structure is as:
{a,b,time}
I am inserting data in the collection through a java service where a and b are integers and time is Date field.
On selecting a field from php I am getting the response as following:
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[b] => 19511297
[time] => Array
(
[$date] => Array
(
[$numberLong] => 1516688016000
)
)
)
)
How to get the time in the format as through the php function date('Y-m-d H:i:s) ?

Answer 1

Seems like your epoch timestamp is in milliseconds, so you need to do something like this:
$array[0]['time']['$date']['$numberLong'] = 1516688016000;
$timestamp = $array[0]['time']['$date']['$numberLong'] / 1000;
echo date("Y-m-d H:i:s", $timestamp);

Answer 2

It looks like $numberLong contains unix-timestamp, hence you can try something like this:
$data[0]['time']['$date']['date'] = date(
'Y-m-d H:i:s',
$data[0]['time']['$date']['$numberLong'] / 1000
);

Answer 3

You have to use correct MongoDB library first.
When you will extract data from database a datetime field in PHP would be represented as UTCDateTime.
When you had it converted to array it was like ['$date']['$numberLong']. But you don't have to do that.
When you will get a list of documents from your collection, you can iterate over cursor and extract date and time in any convenient format using toDateTime() method in conjunction with format() later.
Look at the example below:
$cursor = $collection->find([]);
foreach ($cursor as $doc) {
echo "\n" . $doc['time']->toDateTime()->format("Y-m-d H:i:s");
}
One of advantages here is that you are not loosing accuracy. The other advantage is that you can deal with timezones in a very efficient way.
For example, if you want to display date and time in IST timezone, you can do it like this:
$timezone = new DateTimeZone('Asia/Kolkata');
foreach ($cursor as $doc) {
echo "\n" . $doc['time']->toDateTime()->setTimeZone($timezone)->format("Y-m-d H:i:s");
}
I recommend you to take a look at Robo 3T (formerly Robomongo), it will help you to work with MongoDB.