This is actually a followup question From this question , but it presents a whole different problem . I also know it is pretty confusing so please bear with me ,.
I have a date that presents like : 1/04/2013 which is intended to be Jan 04 2013
In the previous mentioned question, I had to randomly add the hours and minutes to the time format , and it works for what it was supposed to do :
$clr_datenew = date('Y-m-d ' . sprintf('%02d:%02d:00', mt_rand(0, 23), mt_rand(0, 59)), strtotime($date));
this produced something like : 2013-05-01 08:57:00
The problem is , that now the system see that date as MAY 1st and not as JAN 05..
when I automatically insert those posts (wp) – all the posts that will have a date like 2012-05-28 will be inserted to the DB as 1970-01-01 ( I presume this is the default “wrong date” format for php .. 28th month is an error of course.. )
I tried to change the day month from
$clr_datenew = date('Y-m-d ' . sprintf('%02d:%02d:00', mt_rand(0, 23), mt_rand(0, 59)), strtotime($date));
to
$clr_datenew = date('Y-d-m ' . sprintf('%02d:%02d:00', mt_rand(0, 23), mt_rand(0, 59)), strtotime($date));
But it produces the same error with different date combinations .
After a colleague gave me a tip that :
strtotime interprets x/y/z as mm/dd/yy[yy], and x-y-z as dd-mm-yyyy or
yy-mm-dd, depending on whether z is 4 digits or 2.
I also tried :
date('Y-m-d ' . sprintf('%02d:%02d:00', mt_rand(0, 23), mt_rand(0, 59)), strtotime(str_replace('/','-',$clr_date)));
I am really loosing my mind here 🙂
I presume this is becasue I use strtotime() where the function actually “guess” how to format my time based on a loosely “human” format .
Is there a function to convert the dates from one date to another while specifying both the original date format and the wanted conversion format ??
something like dummy_function($origformat,$wantedformat) where I can specify dummy_function('Y-d-m','Y-m-d')
EDIT I
After reading the comment by @harke something triggered in me and combining it with the answer by @Maks3w it appears that the format which is working for me is :
$clr_datenew = date('Y-m-d ' . sprintf('%02d:%02d:00', mt_rand(0, 23), mt_rand(0, 59)), strtotime(str_replace('/','-',$clr_date)));
I could not verify the Php 5.3+ methods since they are not so relevant for me as the ( internal) server in that particular company is running lower version ..
A little extra something that should be posted on every billboard of DB designers / programmers : http://xkcd.com/1179/
That is – until further notice 🙂
The first argument of
date()is a format mask for print literals you must escape each char with a backslashDecide on one internal time representation and stick to it. Preferably choose one that is a standard across many systems.
m/d/yis not such a standard (despite what many Americans like to think ;P). Virtually the universal standard isY-m-d H:i:s(expressed as format string for thedate()function). Most databases expect this format, all time related functions can parse that format without ambiguity.The above is a useful text representation of the date that is interchangeable between different systems, but internally it makes sense to represent the date in an even more flexible type: a UNIX timestamp or a
DateTimeobject. Pick one or the other and keep all your dates internally in your code in that format. Both allow easy manipulation of time values. Only change it back to a string when you need to display the date to a user or you need to send it as a string to another system (i.e. insert into a database). Don’t convert back and forth betweenm/d/ystrings to UNIX timestamps tod/m/ystrings.To parse a date in a known format into a UNIX timestamp or
DateTimeobject to format it into something else later, useDateTime::createFromFormaton recent PHP versions (5.3+) or the olderstrptimefollowed by some manual reassembly.