date formatting in php

Hi,

I am having a string as mentioned below:

$ts  = "3/11/09 11:18:59 AM"; which I have got using date() function

Now i need to convert this to a readable format like below

11-Mar-2009

I have ave tried everything using date()

Can someone please help me with this??

From stackoverflow

• You need to convert it to something you can use for further formatting. strtotime() is a good start, which yields a unix timestamp. You can format that one using strftime() then.

  strftime("%d-%b-%G", strtotime($ts));
  

  gnanesh : Thanks a ton.. It worked :)

  vava : strftime doesn't work under Windows

  soulmerge : True, It doesn't work on *every* installation - there are windows builds with this function, though. You can use date() instead, if you want to.

  R. Bemrose : @Vadim: Which PHP for Windows installs doesn't it work under? strftime() is a wrapper over the C call of the same name, which is a standard part of time.h. As I recall, date() is also a wrapper over strftime(), but does more for you.

• If you initially get the string from the date() function, then pass on formatting arguments to the date-function instead:

  date('Y-m-d')

  instead of converting the string once again.

  EDIT: If you need to keep track of the actual timestamp, then store it as a timestamp:

    
  // Store the timestamp in a variable. This is just an integer, unix timestamp (seconds since epoch)
  $time = time();
  
  // output ISO8601 (maybe insert to database? whatever) 
  echo date('Y-m-d H:i', $time);
  
  // output your readable format
  echo date('j-M-Y', $time);
  

  Using strtotime() is convinient but unessecary parsing and storage of a timerepresentation is a stupid idea.

  gnanesh : Thats not an option as I need to get the time as well. Only while I am displaying I need in the mentioned format

  jishi : You should keep the date in an easily used format for the computer itself, not as a string. the return of the time() method is a good start, and then pass that variable as the 2nd argument to date() for formatting. I'll update my answer.

• You can use the date() function to generate the required format directly, like so:

  date("j-M-Y");
  

  See www.php.net/date for all the possible formats of the output of the date() function.

  gnanesh : Thats not an option as I need to get the time as well. Only while I am displaying I need in the mentioned format

• Actually I tried doing this and it worked.

  echo date("d-M-Y", strtotime($ts));
  

  St. John Johnson : I would recommend this over the current answer as it works in Windows as well.

• JISHI's answer is correct