Why coming dates from csv display as numbers in php side? - php

Question

Well, I don't know why it's happening but my following date field of excel displayed as numbers not even timestamp.
Screenshot of my excel csv file date field.
Now, when I read CSV date field will shows this date as following numbers in combobox using php and I don't know why it's displaying like that and what should I do to convert back to my csv file date.
Following date is displayed when I do data[$k] to do csv file reading:
41724 and 41731 and so on in combobox. What to do?
My code:
while($data = fgetcsv($handle, 1000, ",")) {
if($row == 10) {
break;
}
else {
if($mycount == 0) {
$mycount = 1;
$field_name = $data[$k];
$tot_combo = $tot_combo + 1;
} else {
**$user_data[]** = $data[$k]; //where date coming here
}
$row = $row+1;
}
}
So after did some more research I found in csv excel file my date column is assigned as date and when reading file in php it convert that date column to text which will return me 41708 not 10/03/2014 any idea how to achieve this Thanks

Answer 1

Because that number is an MS Excel serialized timestamp, it's how MS Excel stores date values and then uses a number format mask to render them as a human readable date.
A quick and dirty conversion to a PHP DateTime object:
function ExcelToPHPObject($excelDateTime = 0) {
$calendarBaseLine = '1899-12-30';
if ($excelDateTime < 60) {
// 29th February will be treated as 28th February
++$excelDateTime;
}
return (new \DateTime($calendarBaseLine, new \DateTimeZone('UTC')))
->modify('+' . floor($excelDateTime) . ' days')
->modify('+' . floor(fmod($excelDateTime, 1) * 86400) . ' seconds');
}
This function will return a PHP DateTime object (assumes MS Excel Windows 1900 calendar), and you can then use the DateTime object's format() method to format the date/time however you want, so:
$excelDateTime = 41724;
echo ExcelToPHPObject($excelDateTime)->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');