How to display a date as iso 8601 format with PHP

Question

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: 1969-12-31

Answer 1

Using the DateTime class available in PHP version 5.2 it would be done like this:

$datetime = new DateTime('17 Oct 2008');
echo $datetime->format('c');

See it in action

As of PHP 5.4 you can do this as a one-liner:

echo (new DateTime('17 Oct 2008'))->format('c');