Cannot update Date field - MySQL PHP

Question

My webpage has a date field which uses javascript calendar. The format of the date field on web page is MM/DD/YYYY. When the user enters all information and hits submit, all fields except the corresponding field of Date gets updated. Here are details:

HTML:

 <tr>
      <td><label><font color="red">*</font>Date:</label></td>
      <td><input name= "Date" value="Select Date" id="popupDatepicker"></td>
 </tr>

PHP Code:

<?php
      $sql = "INSERT INTO MYTABLE (...., USER_DATE, ...) VALUES (...., '$_POST[Date]', ...)"
     ....
?>

MySQL: USER_DATE: DATETIME datatype.

When a new record in inserted, the USER_DATE shows 0000-00-00 00:00:00 as value even when the Date field is populated on the UI side.

Can anyone please guide me as to the issue here.

Answer 1

MM/DD/YYYY is not the datetime format that MySQL uses.

Try this...

date('Y-m-d', strtotime($date));

Example

$date = '02/07/2011';

$sqlDate = date('Y-m-d', strtotime($date));

var_dump($sqlDate); // string(10) "2011-02-07"

CodePad .

Answer 2

When inserting a date to a MySQL datetime field, your must use YYYY-MM-DD format.

As a sidenote : you must escape strings, using mysql_real_escape_string() or mysqli_real_escape_string() , depending on the set of functions you are using, to prevent SQL Injections !

Answer 3

Change the date format after submitting the form.

Mysql accept date in yyyy-mm-dd format

echo date('Y-m-d',strtotime($_POST['date']));

Answer 4

If you don't want to use the standard DATETIME format yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss you can use a TIMESTAMP which is an integer with the number of seconds passed since Jan 01, 1970 or you could also use a VARCHAR where you insert what you want.

My opinion is to go for the TIMESTAMP since afterwards you can format it as you like with php's date functions.