[SOLVED] Parse datetime string into year, month, and day variables

Parse datetime string into year, month, and day variables

I have string with following format:

$date = "2012-07-22 17:48:24";

I want to get the year, month and date in the variables and ignore the time. I am trying following:

list($year, $month, $day) = split('[-]', $date);

This returns correct values to $year and $month, but the $day gets: "22 17:48:24", while I want to get only 22.

Solution

Instead of exploding the value you could use a DateTime object:

<?php
$date = "2012-07-22 17:48:24";
$dateTime = new DateTime($date);

var_dump(array(
    'year' => $dateTime->format('Y'),
    'month' => $dateTime->format('m'),
    'day' => $dateTime->format('d'),        
));

This would be the most flexible option imho.

As @zerkms noted in his comment you could also use strtotime() and date(), but I find myself only using the DateTime class lately. Not only because it has a nice OO API, but also because it will keep on working after the year 2038 :-). The comment is not wrong though.