How to display a date as iso 8601 format with PHP

php mysql date date-format time-format
Matthew James Taylor picture Matthew James Taylor · May 24, 2009 · Viewed 110.6k times · Source

I'm trying to display a datetime from my MySQL database as an iso 8601 formated string with PHP but it's coming out wrong.

17 Oct 2008 is coming out as: 1969-12-31T18:33:28-06:00 which is clearly not correct (the year should be 2008 not 1969)

This is the code I'm using:

<?= date("c", $post[3]) ?>

$post[3] is the datetime (CURRENT_TIMESTAMP) from my MySQL database.

Any ideas what's going wrong?

Answer

Paolo Bergantino picture Paolo Bergantino · May 24, 2009

The second argument of date is a UNIX timestamp, not a database timestamp string.

You need to convert your database timestamp with strtotime.

<?= date("c", strtotime($post[3])) ?>

Related questions

How do I store an UTC ISO8601 date in a MySQL database?

I have thousands of dates in the following format: 2011-10-02T23:25:42Z (aka ISO 8601 in UTC) What MySQL data type should I use for storing such a ISO8601 date in a MySQL database? E.g. Datetime, timestamp or something …

Read More
PHP mysql insert date format

Im using jQuery datepicker the format of the datepicker is this 08/25/2012 i have errors when inserting to my database it insert only 0000-00-00 00 00 00 my codes is <?php $id = $_POST['id']; $name = $_POST['name']; $date = $_POST['date']; $sql = mysql_…

Read More
adding 1 day to a DATETIME format value

In certain situations I want to add 1 day to the value of my DATETIME formatted variable: $start_date = date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime("{$_GET['start_hours']}:{$_GET['start_minutes']} {$_GET['start_ampm']}")); What is the best way to do …

Read More