[nonhuman]

I'm currently working on a PHP/MySQL project that, among other things, involves dates. I have a function that I wrote a long time ago that I've been using for years which converts MySQL dates and datetimes to a more readable format. It's never given me problems before, but not, for some reason, it is.

Basically you give the function a MySQL datetime such as '2007-03-16 13:11:30' and it returns 'Mar. 16, 2007; 1:11 PM'. But for some reason when the page is on my client's server it's returning a string more like '. 13, 2007; 139 PM'. I know the MySQL date is being set correctly, because it's being set as NOW() rather than manually. And the code is identical, so I can't figure out what's causing this problem.

Has anyone encountered anything similar or have any ideas of how I could fix this?

Here's the function:
[codex]function fix_date($sql_date, $US = 1, $time = 0) {
$months = array(1 => "Jan", 2 => "Feb", 3 => "Mar",
4 => "Apr", 5 => "May", 6 => "Jun",
7 => "Jul", 8 => "Aug", 9 => "Sep",
10 => "Oct", 11 => "Nov", 12 => "Dec");

$year = substr($sql_date, 0, 4);
$month = (int)substr($sql_date, 5, 2);
$day = substr($sql_date, 8, 2);

if (substr($sql_date, 0, 10) == "0000-00-00" || $year == "9999" || $sql_date == "" || is_null($sql_date))
$date = "TBD";
else {
if ($US)
$date = "$months[$month]. $day, $year";
else
$date = "$day $months[$month] $year";
}
if ($time) {
$date .= "; ";
$hour = (int)substr($sql_date, 11, 2);
$date .= $hour > 12 ? $hour - 12 : $hour;
$date .= substr($sql_date, 13, 3);
$date .= $hour >= 12 ? " PM" : " AM";
}

return $date;
}[/codex]

(I really wish that would preserve indentation...)

[besson3c]

I think your code is much more complicated than it has to be.

To convert 2007-03-16 13:11:30 to 'Mar. 16, 2007; 1:11 PM', all you need is this:

<?php
$input_date = "2007-03-16 13:11:30";
$output_date = date('M. d, Y; h:i A', strtotime($input_date));
?>

[nonhuman]

*smacks forehead*

Thanks, I feel like an idiot. I guess that's what happens when you keep reusing code you wrote a long time ago. It never even occurred to me to bother improving it until now.

Now to see if the new version works on the client's server properly as well.

[besson3c]

strtotime is very useful, it will convert many different kinds of date formats to a Unix timestamp. The PHP "date" function will allow you to format a date in any desired format based on either today's date, or a Unix timestamp:

PHP: date - Manual

You can do date calculations (e.g. 1 month from now) via date and mktime, e.g.

1 month from now:

<?php
$today = explode('-', date('Y-m-d'));
$output_date = date('Y-m-d', mktime(0, 0, 0, $today[1] + 1, $today[2], $today[0]));
?>

This will output 2007-04-16, but you can substitute your own date format for Y-m-d