Push strangely formatted dates into MySQL from PHP

Question

I am sure this must be a common question but I cannot find it anywhere so here it goes:

I have dates in this format: 09/Jul/2003:00:03:48 -0300 and I want to push them into a DATETIME field in MySQL.

What is the easiest way to do this? Pushing them in as is results in them being zeroed.

Answer 1

MySQL doesn't include the timezone in DATETIMEs, but you can use:

STR_TO_DATE('09/Jul/2003:00:03:48', '%d/%b/%Y:%H:%i:%s')

...to convert a string representation of a date/time into a DATETIME for storing in the database.

Reference:

• STR_TO_DATE

Answer 2

As far as I know can not be changed and has to be in the format below:

'YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS'

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/datetime.html

Answer 3

My favorite function in all of PHP is strtotime(). If that can't interpret the input then I probably can't code something that could.

So I would do something like:

mysql_real_escape_string(date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime($stragely_formatted_date)));

to prepare a DATE string to give to MySQL.

As always, think about timezones in your the design.

The mysql_real_escape_string() is probably unnecessary but I always feel more secure when I use it.