在MySQL表中包含星期几

Question

How would I go about changing the way a 'sign up' date is displayed in a MySQL table? I wanted the date to be formatted in this way: Monday, August 26 2013 6:04PM instead of the usual, standard format based on a 24 hour clock.

Currently I have:

$value = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['First']);
$value2 = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['Last']);
$value3 = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['City']);
$value4 = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['State']);
$value5 = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['Country']);
$value6 = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['Email']);

SQL:

$sql = "
  INSERT INTO members
    (First, Last, City, State, Country, Email, Date)
  VALUES
    ('$value', '$value2', '$value3', '$value4', '$value5', '$value6', NOW())
";

I thought changing the format was as simple as this:

$sql = "
  INSERT INTO members
    (First, Last, City, State, Country, Email, Date) 
  VALUES
    ('$value','$value2','$value3','$value4','$value5','$value6' ("l-F-j-Y))
";

Answer 1

Let the date be a date. Just store it the way MySQL wants it to store it and then transform it the way you want it to look like in your presentation layer. Even if there isn't any presentation layer just format the date in a select statement using the date formatting functions in MySQL.

Check this link to see those functions.

Answer 2

You can refer to the php docs to help you format the date. It will work exactly how you want it.

But, I personally prefer to have the unix timestamp in the database, and then have the above function to format it any way I want; that allows you to change it from format to format at any time, without having to manually edit every database entry.

NOTE : You should look into PDO or MySQLi because the MySQL functions will be removed in future versions of PHP.