Victor’s Programming Aid

When using web technologies PHP and MySql on a web application, you may come across the need to add the current DateTime in your database. A simple way to get the server time in PHP is to use the $_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME'] function. It will return the time in seconds since January 1, 1970. In our example, we return the number of seconds to a variable $timestampInSeconds.

$timestampInSeconds = $_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME'];

The next step once you get the the seconds is to convert it into a format that MySql will understand. In particular, MySql DateTime is ‘2008-08-01 20:01:05′. Pay attention to the leading zeros in front of the month, day, hours, minutes, and seconds. Also note that the hour field is a twenty four hour field. To accomplish this string format in PHP, we can utilize the date function. The below example will store in $mySqlDateTimea date format MySql will understand.

$mySqlDateTime= date("Y-m-d H:i:s", $timestampInSeconds);

You now have a datetime variable stored in $mySqlDateTime that can be used in a sql statement for MySql.