How do I change the date format Laravel outputs to JSON?

Question

I\'ve built an application in Laravel and eloquent returns dates in this format: 2015-04-17 00:00:00. I\'m sending one particular query to JSON so I can make a

Answer 1

Expanding on umbrel's answer a bit I've created a trait that turns the DateTimeInstance into a Carbon instance so that I can easily make use of it's common formats.

In my particular case I wanted to serialize all dates according to ISO-8601.

The trait is as follows...

use DateTimeInterface;
use Carbon\Carbon;

trait Iso8601Serialization
{
    /**
     * Prepare a date for array / JSON serialization.
     *
     * @param  \DateTimeInterface  $date
     * @return string
     */
    protected function serializeDate(DateTimeInterface $date)
    {
        return Carbon::instance($date)->toIso8601String();
    }

}

and from here I can simply use it on the relevant models...

class ApiObject extends Model
{
    use Iso8601Serialization;
}

Obviously you could name the trait more appropriately if you're using a different format but the point is that you can use any of Carbon's common formats simply by replacing toIso8601String() with the format you need.