How would you convert a datestring that will be formated like...
m/d/yyyy H:i:s or mm/dd/yyyy H:i:s...
and format it like... yyyy-mm-dd H:i:s
I can format either of the two inputs into my desired format, but not both.
function format_date($date){
return date('Y-m-d H:i:s',strtotime($date));
}
should do the trick.
Easiest way would be to simply transform it to unix time first with strtotime then run strftime on it afterwards... not the bes practice but it eliminates alot of the potential format parsing issues :-)
How are you formatting it now? If you're certain that those are the only two date formats you'll possibly have as input, then you can explode() it on the forward slashes, then if strlen() returns 1 on the month or the date, add a 0 as you're creating your yyyy-mm-dd string.
However, if you're not guaranteed that those are your only two input formats, then I would use strtotime() to convert it to epoch, then use date() to format it as you desire. A slightly bigger processing hit, but much more universal code.
Related
I am having a little trouble with changing the format of a date with php, the format in question is dd/mm/yy, however I wanting to change that to yyyy-mm-dd.
I have tried doing this,
date('Y-m-d', '23/04/10')
The second argument for date() should be unixtimestamp and not a string like you have. Use strtotime() (you might need to change the string, read up on the manual!) to convert your string to unixtimestamp first.
date('Y-m-d', strtotime('23/04/10'))
I want to convert date 24/09/2010 in format dd/mm/yyyy to 2010-09-24 in format yyyy-mm-dd.
This works:
date("Y-m-d",strtotime("09/24/2010"));
But this does not:
date("Y-m-d",strtotime("24/09/2010")); // it returns '1970-01-01'
Any idea why?
according to php, the valid php formats are stated here. So basically what you gave is invalid.
Alternatively, you can use mktime, date_parse_from_format or date_create_from_format
strtotime does its best to guess what you mean when given a string, but it can't handle all date formats. In you example, it is probably thinking that you are trying to refer to the 24th month, which isn't valid, and returns 0, which date then treats as the unix epoch (the date you got).
you can get around this using the mktime() and explode() functions, like so:
$date = "24/09/2010";
$dateArr = explode("/",$date);
$timeStamp = mktime(0,0,0,$dateArr[1],$dateArr[0],$dateArr[2]);
$newFormat = date("Y-m-d",$timeStamp);
As you say,
date("Y-m-d",strtotime("09/24/2010"))
will work,because the date format--"09/24/2010"is correct,
but "24/09/2010" is not the correct date format.
you can find something useful here
Hallo, I want to find the difference between today and another date,
convert todays date into unix time format here
<?php
echo '1st one'.strtotime(date("d.m.Y")).'<br>';
echo '2nd one'.strtotime(date("m.d.Y")).'<br>';
?>
The first echo is producing some value, but not the second one. What is the bug in it...please help..
strtotime makes assumptions based on the date format you give it. For instance
date("Y-m-d", strtotime(date("d.m.Y"))) //=> "2010-09-27"
date("Y-m-d", strtotime(date("m.d.Y"))) //=> "1969-12-31"
Note that when given an invalid date, strtotime defaults to the timestamp for 1969-12-31 19:00:00, so when you end up with an unexpected date in 1969, you know you're working with an invalid date.
Because strtotime is looking for day.month.year when you use . as the delimiter, so it sees "9.27.2010" as the 9th day of the 27th month, which obviously doesn't exist.
However, if you change it to use / as the delimiter:
date("Y-m-d", strtotime(date("d/m/Y"))) //=> "1969-12-31"
date("Y-m-d", strtotime(date("m/d/Y"))) //=> "2010-09-27"
In this case, strtotime expects dates in month/day/year format.
If you want to be safe, Y-m-d is generally a good format to use.
It's worth pointing out that strtotime() does accept words like "today" as valid input, so you don't need to put a call to date() in there if all you want is today's date. You could just use strtotime('today');.
Come to think of it, a simple call to time(); will get you the current time stamp too.
But to actually answer the question, you need to consider that d.m.Y and m.d.Y are ambiguous - if the day of the month is less than the 12th, it is impossible to tell which of those two date formats was intended. Therefore PHP only accepts one of them (I believe it uses m/d/Y if you have slashes, but for dots or dashes it assumes d-m-Y.
If you're using strtotime() internally for converting date formats, etc, there is almost certainly a better way to do it. But if you really need to do this, then use 'Y-m-d' format, because it's much more universally reliable.
On the other hand, if you're accepting date input from your users and assuming that strtotime() will deal with anything thrown at it, then sadly you're wrong; strtotime() has some quite big limitations, of which you've found one. But there are a number of others. If you plan to use strtotime() for this sort of thing then you need to do additional processing as well. There may also be better options such as using a front-end Javascript date control to make it easier for your users without having to rely on strtotime() to work out what they meant.
strtotime does not consider 09.27.2010 to be a valid date...
You could check it like this:
<?php
// will return false (as defined by the docs)
echo var_dump(strtotime("09.27.2010"));
?>
The function expects to be given a string containing a US English date format and will try to parse that format into a Unix timestamp. US time format is : MM DD YYYY
look here for the Information about which formats are valid http://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.formats.php. But what do you mean with deference between 2 dates? You mean the Timespan between 2 dates?
echo (time() - strotime("- 2 days")) . " seconds difference";
Something like that?
strtotime would not take the d.m.y format. good way is Y-m-d
To change 2009-12-09 13:32:15 to 09/12/2009
here:
echo date("d/m/Y", strtotime('2009-12-09 13:32:15'))
You can use strtotime to get the timestamp of the first date, and date to convert it to a string using the format you want.
$timestamp = strtotime('2009-12-09 13:32:15');
echo date('d/m/Y', $timestamp);
And you'll get :
09/12/2009
[edit 2012-05-19] Note that strtotime() suffers a couple of possibly important limitations:
The format of the date must be YYYY-MM-DD; it might work in some other cases, but not always !
Also, working with UNIX Timestamps, as done with date() and strtotime() means you'll only be able to work with dates between 1970 and 2038 (possibly a wider range, depending on your system -- but not and illimited one anyway)
Working with the DateTime class is often a far better alternative:
You can use either DateTime::__construct() or DateTime::createFromFormat() to create a DateTime object -- the second one is only available with PHP >= 5.3, but allows you to specify the date's format, which can prove useful,
And you can use the DateTime::format() method to convert that object to any date format you might want to work with.
Using the date() method.
print date("d/m/Y", strtotime("2009-12-09 13:32:15"));
$long_date = '2009-12-09 13:32:15';
$epoch_date = strtotime($long_date);
$short_date = date('m/d/Y', $epoch_date);
The above is not the shortest way of doing it, but having the long date as an epoch timestamp ensures that you can reuse the original long date to get other date format outputs, like if you wanted to go back and have just the time somewhere else.
I have a string as mentioned below:
$ts = "3/11/09 11:18:59 AM";
which I got using the date() function.
Now I need to convert this to a readable format like below
11-Mar-2009
I have tried everything using date(). How can I achieve this?
You need to convert it to something you can use for further formatting. strtotime() is a good start, which yields a unix timestamp. You can format that one using strftime() then.
strftime("%d-%b-%G", strtotime($ts));
Actually I tried doing this and it worked.
echo date("d-M-Y", strtotime($ts));
If you initially get the string from the date() function, then pass on formatting arguments to the date-function instead:
date('Y-m-d')
instead of converting the string once again.
EDIT: If you need to keep track of the actual timestamp, then store it as a timestamp:
// Store the timestamp in a variable. This is just an integer, unix timestamp (seconds since epoch)
$time = time();
// output ISO8601 (maybe insert to database? whatever)
echo date('Y-m-d H:i', $time);
// output your readable format
echo date('j-M-Y', $time);
Using strtotime() is convinient but unessecary parsing and storage of a timerepresentation is a stupid idea.
You can use the date() function to generate the required format directly, like so:
date("j-M-Y");
See www.php.net/date for all the possible formats of the output of the date() function.