How to format datetime most easily in PHP?

Question

To change 2009-12-09 13:32:15 to 09/12/2009

Answer 1

You can use strtotime to get the timestamp of the first date, and date to convert it to a string using the format you want.

$timestamp = strtotime('2009-12-09 13:32:15');
echo date('d/m/Y', $timestamp);

And you'll get :

09/12/2009

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[edit 2012-05-19] Note that strtotime() suffers a couple of possibly important limitations:

• The format of the date must be YYYY-MM-DD; it might work in some other cases, but not always !
• Also, working with UNIX Timestamps, as done with date() and strtotime() means you'll only be able to work with dates between 1970 and 2038 (possibly a wider range, depending on your system -- but not and illimited one anyway)

Working with the DateTime class is often a far better alternative:

• You can use either DateTime::__construct() or DateTime::createFromFormat() to create a DateTime object -- the second one is only available with PHP >= 5.3, but allows you to specify the date's format, which can prove useful,
• And you can use the DateTime::format() method to convert that object to any date format you might want to work with.