Fastest way to get month, day, year, from date string - php

Question

I am getting a date from the mysql database:
here is what it comes out as:
2017-01-20
what would be the fastest way to get the month, day, and year, so for example, when i echo, it will be like this:
echo $month; //01
echo $day; //20
echo $year; //2017

Answer 1

Well, if you know that the output will consistently be a string in the format "YYYY-MM-DD", the most basic approach is:
<?php
$query = ... //query is your string "YYYY-MM-DD"
$year = substr($query, 0, 4);
$month = substr($query, 5, 2);
$day = substr($query, 8, 2);
echo $month;
echo $day;
echo $year;
?>

Answer 2

Let's assume you have that string in a variable called $date
$date = '2017-01-20';
You can explode it into a list if you are sure the format is consistent:
list($year, $month, $day) = explode("-", $date, 3);
You could convert the date to a time integer using strtotime to use in other functions like date. This has the added benefit of being able to test that this is a well-formed date:
$time = strtotime($date);
if ($time === false) die("Bad date format: $date.");
$year = date('Y', $time);
$month = date('m', $time); // 'n' if you don't want leading zero
$day = date('d', $time); // 'j' if you don't want leading zero
As jasonmoqio points out, since you asked for fastest, substr is a tiny bit faster than exploding. (On my workstation looping substr vs. explode 10 million times only produced an improvement of 1/1000th of a second over exploding, so unless this is in a loop that gets run millions of times, you will not notice the difference and should opt for code readability.)
$year = substr($date, 0, 4);
$month = substr($date, 5, 2);
$day = substr($date, 8, 2);

Answer 3

Try this:
$date = new DateTime('2017-01-20');
echo 'Year:'.$date->format("Y");
echo 'Month:'.$date->format("m");
echo 'Day:'.$date->format("d");
Output:
Year: 2017
Month: 01
Day: 20

Answer 4

If you want to quickly get the date from mysql, try using regex like this.
if (preg_match('/^(?P<year>\d+)[-\/](?P<month>\d+)[-\/](?P<day>\d+)$/', $your_date, $matches)) {
$mydate = $matches['year'] . "-" . $matches['month'] . "-" . $matches['day'];
$whatever = date('Y-m-d', strtotime($tgl));
// You can echo it...
// echo $matches['year'];
// echo $matches['month'];
// echo $matches['day'];
}
Hope this help you out. :D