How do I convert a date string to my datetime format?

Question

I'm trying to convert a variable named $releasedate which contains the string 'May 31, 2011' to the string '2011-05-31 00:00:00' to insert into the database.

I have tried...

$pubdate = date('Y-m-d H:i:s',$releasedate);

...but it didn't work.

How do I do this?

Answer 1

You can use strtotime() .

$pubdate = date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime($releasedate)); // 2011-05-31 00:00:00

CodePad .

Answer 2

strtotime is the quick/easy version, and for a proper "english" date like this, it'd work fine. But it can quite easily choke on something like "01/02/03" (March 2, 2001? Feb 1st, 2003?). As well, there is a fair amount of parseing overhead to try and figure out what the string really is. If you know in advance what the date's format is, you'd be better off using [date_create_from_format()][1] :

$time = date_create_from_format('M j, Y', $release_date);
$formatted = $time->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');