Thread: Datetime in humane format

So, I followed the advice in the archives and used the datetime type.

Now, I've got entries like 'Sun Sep 06 00:06:57 1998 EDT' in my table.

So, how do I turn that into something that a normal human can read?

"Sep 06 1998 12:06 am" would be nice...

Or, how do I turn that back into seconds since epoch?  I'm using PHP which
has a nice date function that I think I can coerce into giving me what I
want... unless it also thinks that humans understand 00:06:57 as just after
midnight...

--
--
-- "TANSTAAFL" Rich lynch@lscorp.com

At 6:27 +0200 on 6/9/98, Richard Lynch wrote:


> So, I followed the advice in the archives and used the datetime type.
>
> Now, I've got entries like 'Sun Sep 06 00:06:57 1998 EDT' in my table.
>
> So, how do I turn that into something that a normal human can read?
>
> "Sep 06 1998 12:06 am" would be nice...
>
> Or, how do I turn that back into seconds since epoch?  I'm using PHP which
> has a nice date function that I think I can coerce into giving me what I
> want... unless it also thinks that humans understand 00:06:57 as just after
> midnight...

That depends on the country... To me, 24-hour clocks are as natural as
hailing a cab.

Seconds since epoch - very easy: the function date_part will do that for
you. Read the manpage of pgbuiltin.

Perhaps its worthwhile to delve into the PHP documentation. Perhaps you can
transfer the result you got from a query on a date field directly to some
PHP date type which allows formatting. At least in Java that's how it's
done - so why not in others.

Herouth

--
Herouth Maoz, Internet developer.
Open University of Israel - Telem project
http://telem.openu.ac.il/~herutma

On Sat, 5 Sep 1998, Richard Lynch wrote:

> Date: Sat, 5 Sep 1998 23:27:08 -0500
> From: Richard Lynch <lynch@lscorp.com>
> To: pgsql-sql@postgreSQL.org
> Subject: [SQL] Datetime in humane format
>
> So, I followed the advice in the archives and used the datetime type.
>
> Now, I've got entries like 'Sun Sep 06 00:06:57 1998 EDT' in my table.
>
> So, how do I turn that into something that a normal human can read?
>
> "Sep 06 1998 12:06 am" would be nice...

I've written a function to do just that using the datetime type and PHP.
Here it is:

function article_date_format($date) {
        $main = explode(" ", $date);
        $mdy = explode("/", $main[0]);
        $hms = explode(":", $main[1]);
        $sec = explode("\.", $hms[2]);
        $timestamp = mktime($hms[0], $hms[1], $sec[0], $mdy[0], $mdy[1],
$mdy[2]);
        $new_date = date("l, F d, Y", $timestamp);
        $more_date = date("h:i A", $timestamp);
        if (substr($more_date, 0, 1) == "0"):
                $more_date = substr($more_date, 1, strlen($more_date));
        endif;
        $new_date .= "    $more_date";
        return $new_date;
}

--------------

Before I execute that function, I send this command to Postgres (via PHP):

SET DateStyle to 'SQL'

to ensure that my function works properly on the dates I'm fetching.

I'm not sure my solution is the most efficient one, but I know it works
for me.  Hope it helps...

eric

>
> Or, how do I turn that back into seconds since epoch?  I'm using PHP which
> has a nice date function that I think I can coerce into giving me what I
> want... unless it also thinks that humans understand 00:06:57 as just after
> midnight...
>
> --
> --
> -- "TANSTAAFL" Rich lynch@lscorp.com
>
>
>
>

_______________________
Eric McKeown
ericm@palaver.net
http://www.palaver.net