Help with date() and mktime() functions

[bballer]

New user of PHP here! I'm using it to display entries from my MYSQL database. Image below.

 

 

This is the code snippet that displays information from the 'name', 'author' and 'date' columns of my database. I learned this technique from w3schools.

 

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM levels ORDER BY date DESC");

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
	echo "<tr>";
	echo "<td>" . $row['name'] . "</td>";
	echo "<td>" . $row['author'] . "</td>";
	echo "<td align='right'>" . $row['date'] . "</td>";
	echo "</tr>";
}

 

I would like to use the date() function to format the date differently. But the date() function requires that I convert my time into a timestamp. I know you have to use the mktime() function for this, but I don't know how.

 

Can someone show me how to pass the contents from $row[date] into the mktime() function?

[Pikachu2000]

How is the date currently stored in the database? What is the data type of the field it's stored in?

[bballer]

It's currently stored as:

 

2010-11-24

 

And the data type is DATE.

[Pikachu2000]

Much simpler to format it in the query using MySQL's native DATE_FORMAT() function, as long as the data is stored properly (which it is).

 

$result = mysql_query("SELECT `name`, `author`, DATE_FORMAT(`date`, '%b-%e-%Y') as `form_date` FROM `levels` ORDER BY `date` DESC");
while( $row = mysql_fetch_array($result) ) {
{
echo "<tr>";
echo "<td>" . $row['name'] . "</td>";
echo "<td>" . $row['author'] . "</td>";
echo "<td align='right'>" . $row['form_date'] . "</td>";
echo "</tr>";
}

[bballer]

That's way easier. Thanks!