Convert a date format in PHP

Question

I am trying to convert a date from yyyy-mm-dd to dd-mm-yyyy (but not in SQL); however I don\'t know how the date function requires a timestamp, and

Answer 1

For this specific conversion we can also use a format string.

$new = vsprintf('%3$s-%2$s-%1$s', explode('-', $old));

Obviously this won't work for many other date format conversions, but since we're just rearranging substrings in this case, this is another possible way to do it.

Answer 2

Use date_create and date_format

Try this.

function formatDate($input, $output){
  $inputdate = date_create($input);
  $output = date_format($inputdate, $output);
  return $output;
}

Answer 3

Note: Because this post's answer sometimes gets upvoted, I came back here to kindly ask people not to upvote it anymore. My answer is ancient, not technically correct, and there are several better approaches right here. I'm only keeping it here for historical purposes.

Although the documentation poorly describes the strtotime function, @rjmunro correctly addressed the issue in his comment: it's in ISO format date "YYYY-MM-DD".

Also, even though my Date_Converter function might still work, I'd like to warn that there may be imprecise statements below, so please do disregard them.

The most voted answer is actually incorrect!

The PHP strtotime manual here states that "The function expects to be given a string containing an English date format". What it actually means is that it expects an American US date format, such as "m-d-Y" or "m/d/Y".

That means that a date provided as "Y-m-d" may get misinterpreted by strtotime. You should provide the date in the expected format.

I wrote a little function to return dates in several formats. Use and modify at will. If anyone does turn that into a class, I'd be glad if that would be shared.

function Date_Converter($date, $locale = "br") {

    # Exception
    if (is_null($date))
        $date = date("m/d/Y H:i:s");

    # Let's go ahead and get a string date in case we've
    # been given a Unix Time Stamp
    if ($locale == "unix")
        $date = date("m/d/Y H:i:s", $date);

    # Separate Date from Time
    $date = explode(" ", $date);

    if ($locale == "br") {
        # Separate d/m/Y from Date
        $date[0] = explode("/", $date[0]);
        # Rearrange Date into m/d/Y
        $date[0] = $date[0][1] . "/" . $date[0][0] . "/" . $date[0][2];
    }

    # Return date in all formats
        # US
        $Return["datetime"]["us"] = implode(" ", $date);
        $Return["date"]["us"]     = $date[0];

        # Universal
        $Return["time"]           = $date[1];
        $Return["unix_datetime"]  = strtotime($Return["datetime"]["us"]);
        $Return["unix_date"]      = strtotime($Return["date"]["us"]);
        $Return["getdate"]        = getdate($Return["unix_datetime"]);

        # BR
        $Return["datetime"]["br"] = date("d/m/Y H:i:s", $Return["unix_datetime"]);
        $Return["date"]["br"]     = date("d/m/Y", $Return["unix_date"]);

    # Return
    return $Return;

} # End Function

Answer 4

You can change the format using the date() and the strtotime().

$date = '9/18/2019';

echo date('d-m-y',strtotime($date));

Result:

18-09-19

We can change the format by changing the ( d-m-y ).

Answer 5

Also another obscure possibility:

$oldDate = '2010-03-20'
$arr = explode('-', $oldDate);
$newDate = $arr[2].'-'.$arr[1].'-'.$arr[0];

I don't know if I would use it but still :)

Answer 6

$newDate = preg_replace("/(\d+)\D+(\d+)\D+(\d+)/","$3-$2-$1",$originalDate);

This code works for every date format.

You can change the order of replacement variables such $3-$1-$2 due to your old date format.