Convert string to MySQL date - php

Question

I need to be able to convert a string (see example below) to a format that can be added to MySQL. I could just add it as a var car but I need to be able to run queries based on these date ranges.
e.g. '02 May 2013 12:08 AM GMT'
Any suggestion of the best way to achieve this?
EDIT
Currently trying the following:
$date = date_create_from_format('d M Y H:i A e', '02 May 2013 12:08 AM GMT');
echo $date;
but getting a server error when I trying echoing the date.
I've also tried the following to break the date and timezone apart and try to deal with it separately:
$myvalue = '02 May 2013 12:08 AM GMT';
$arr = explode(' ',trim($myvalue));
$timezone = new DateTimeZone($arr[5]);
$arr[count($arr)-1]='';
$time=implode(' ',$arr);
$date = date_create_from_format('d M Y h:i A', $time, $timezone);
echo $date;
but again I'm getting a server error.
EDIT
I just realized that the second chunk of code might be going wrong due to the GMT as it doesn't appear to be a usable format with this function.
EDIT
After further investigation I think the best way to store the data is to have all dates stored as a DATETIMEin MySQL with the same timezone (gmt) and along with it storing the actual timezone they are and using the timezone when running queries if needed.
$myvalue = '02 May 2013 12:08 AM GMT';
$arr = explode(' ',trim($myvalue));
$timezone = new DateTimeZone($arr[5]);
$arr[count($arr)-1]='';
$time=implode(' ',$arr);
$timestamp = strtotime($time);
$date = date("Y-m-d H:i:s", $timestamp);
echo $date;

Answer 1

Why don't you just do this, then?
function convertToMysqlTime($string){
$seconds = strtotime($string);
if (!$seconds) return false;
return date("Y-m-d H:i:s", $seconds);
}
echo convertToMysqlTime('02 May 2013 12:08 AM GMT');
It accounts for that GMT part, too.

Answer 2

I hope you want to convert date obtained from javascript "Date()" function.
consider this function in javascript part:
function ISODateString(d) // to get date in format that MySQL accepts
{
function pad(n){return n<10 ? '0'+n : n}
return d.getUTCFullYear()+'-'
+ pad(d.getUTCMonth()+1)+'-'
+ pad(d.getUTCDate()) +' '
+ pad(d.getUTCHours())+':'
+ pad(d.getUTCMinutes())+':'
+ pad(d.getUTCSeconds())
}
after this use:
var d=ISODateString(new Date())
now to send it either use post method or GET with url encoding to utf-8

Answer 3

$date = date_create_from_format('d M Y H:i A e', '02 May 2013 12:08 AM GMT');
echo $date;
This code will always produce error messages, for different reasons.
If the PHP version is < 5.3 then the code will fail, because date_create_from_format() does not exist.
If the PHP version is >= 5.3 then the second line will fail, because $date is an instance of DateTime and that class does not have a __toString() method. Use DateTime::format() instead.

Answer 4

Use the DateTime class createFromFormat function. If your PHP version <= 5.3. Here's the documentation: http://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.createfromformat.php
Edit:
$date = DateTime::createFromFormat('d M Y H:i A e','02 May 2013 12:08 AM GMT');
echo $date->getTimeZone()->getName(); //return 'UTC'
echo $date->format('Y-m-d H:i:s'); // return 2013-05-02 00:08
Set the session timezone in mysql:

Answer 5

You can use strtotime() to convert a textual representation of a time (such as your example) to a Unix timestamp:
$timestamp = strtotime($string);
Then you can store this value in MySQL's TIMESTAMP field type.