converting time using strtotime PHP

Question

apologies this is probably a simple question - I am using php and JS to create a counter and I have stored a time using an SQL time field in my DB- I run a query to return this time but I now wish to convert this time into an integer, I assume I need to use the following, but I am lost on the syntax: http://www.electrictoolbox.com/using-strtotime-with-php/

any help would be appreciated. many thanks in advance

Answer 1

It's hard to tell from your question what exactly you mean by "an SQL time field."

MySQL offers four kinds of time-like data types: TIMESTAMP, DATETIME, TIME, and DATE. To some extent it matters which one your table contains.

It's also hard to tell what you mean by "convert this time into an integer." Do you mean a UNIX-style timestamp (number of seconds since 1-Jan-1970 00:00:00 UTC)?

If that's the case you can get your database to do this conversion: use

SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(value) ...

in your query. That will work for all the time-like datatypes except TIME. (Strange, eh? TIME means time of day with no date, so that's why it doesn't work.)

Otherwise, without more information it's hard to tell you how to use php to do this: we can't tell what your converting from and what you're converting to.