PHP和mySQL：日期和时间存储

Question

I've been reading about storing and displaying dates and times in mySQL, but I don't seem to find an answer that suits my needs or I'm incapable of coding my own one. I guess being full of doubts doesn't help at all.

The thing is, I have a mySQL table with a field (text) which I would like to contain certain times and dates. At the moment I'm working with "d/m/YH:i" format, but I'm pretty sure that's not neat. I'm using that format because it's the format I want it to be displayed on the site.

Could anyone tell me what the correct way of handling this issue would be? Maybe I have to store the date and time in another format and convert it when it's going to be be displayed on the site.

Answer 1

You should store them as TIMESTAMP or DATETIME (check the differences here )

and then convert them when you write or read the values, for example:

INSERT INTO table (date_time) VALUES (CURRENT_TIMESTAMP)

SELECT date_format(date_time, '%b %d %Y %h:%i %p') as date_time FROM table ...

Answer 2

i would say your guess would be the best way to do it. Store it in seconds since EPOCH and then convert using any multitude of ways that php offers:

take a look at this:

epoch time stamp

the epoch time stamp is valid for ANY time zone. Which makes your server location not important. You could show time for any time zone as long as your parse it correctly with php (or you could even do it client-side with JS)