Timestamp phpmyadmin in dreamweaver

Question

Working with phpMyAdmin, I've got a table called news
with a field called time
and type timestamp (standard value: current_timestamp; on update current_timestamp)
Now using dreamweaver, I insert the following code to show the time field on a page:
<?php echo $row_news ['time']; ?>
which returns something like 2009-04-20 14:54:02 this for example, though always in this format (0000-00-00 00:00:00)
Since I'm European, this way of time notation is 'weird' to say the least. I would prefer to see it be written like this 20-04-2009 14u54
It's really 'annoying' me because I can't find a way around this myself and I've googled my *** off on this matter. Anyone any suggestions?

Answer 1

MySQL always stores dates in the ISO recommended format, YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS. This avoids all the annoyances of trying to work out whether the date was entered by an American, a European, or an East Asian, all of whom use different ways to display date and time.
So, how do you display the date and time in your own preferred format? Simple. Use the MySQL DATE_FORMAT() function, and assign the result to an alias using the AS keyword. Details of DATE_FORMAT() and all other date/time functions are in the MySQL documentation at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/date-and-time-functions.html.
To display the date in your preferred format, use the following SQL:
SELECT column1, column2,
DATE_FORMAT(time, '%d-%m-%Y %ku%S') AS formatted_time
FROM myTable
You can then retrieve this as part of your recordset as $row_new['formatted_time'].
The formatting character specifiers are all listed in the MySQL page that I referred to earlier. In my example, column1, column2 represent other columns (fields that you want to retrieve from the database in your SQL query.