Quick Question...

[Ragster00]

Recently I reported a bug to PHP.net.

If you are using a PHP 5.x you will notice something very interesting… It no longer excepts mm-dd-YYYY, which is, in the U.S. anyway, common date format.

They told me that this isn’t a bug and just how it works now. I was more than a little displeased with this as I have written several applications that use the date format of mm-dd-YYYY and then use strtotime() to convert it then use date() to convert it into what MySQL excepts, which is dd-mm-YYYY.

Anyone else experience this or can say how they deal with date format conversions?

[Zyppora]

Not being from the US, I find the US-style date format rather illogical. Most logical would be YYYY-MM-DD, for sorting purposes. If you really want to input a US-style date format into a DATE or DATETIME type column in MySQL, perhaps STR_TO_DATE is an option. This allows you to use US-style (or any other style) date formats in your PHP and have MySQL resolve the actual stamp for you.

Personally I prefer the use of (GMT + 0) timestamps throughout my scripts, and use date() to display the desired format on the frontend. This is to make sure no ambiguous date expressions appear (03-05-2008 … is that May 3 or March 5?).

[Ragster00]

As illogical the US date format is, its where I live and the American public is my end user so that I is who I care most about. I hadn’t seen the STR_TO_DATE() before and I thank you for pointing out to me! I will certainly give that a try. The more I can do with the SQL the better!

Thanks again for the help!!

[Zyppora]

I’m not saying it’s wrong to use US style date format, just saying that it makes little sense logic-wise because the order in which the different elements are placed is off. The same goes for ‘our’ format: DD-MM-YYYY hh:mm:ss. It throws off less complex sorting methods (for example, daily logfiles with timestamps in their names on the filesystem get YYYY_MM_DD_filename.ext if I’d be the one deciding on it. Why? Easy sorting