Say you are using MySQL datetime as the format for your dates, so when you output it you get 2009-03-21, which isn’t exactly user friendly nice to read. Say you want instead to have March 21st, 2009. There are of course two main ways to do this, convert the datetime field in php using mktime() to Unix Time, and then format with date() from there. Bit of a pain, and heavier processing then the second way, which is to use MySQL’s DATE_FORMAT. Check out that page, seriously – the list of date modifiers is very comprehensive, and listed here for your pleasure at the bottom of the page.

There’s a great forum post here, mentioning both methods – its well worth a look as the examples are simple and clear.

Quick example would be what we mentioned above, i.e. getting your date in the format of March 21st, 2009. Look how quick it is in MySQL compared to PHP:

SELECT DATE_format(olddate, ‘%M %D, %Y’) as newdate FROM table;

‘olddate’ is the name of your date field in datetime format, and ‘newdate’ is the new var representing the nicely and newly formatted date!