Breaking strings

[vexhawk]

First Issue: Problem
So on a forum, i've condensed the date of a certain event to

$date = $month . " " . $day . ", " . $year;

So instead of storing the Month Day and Year in seperate rows on mysql, i store all three under 1.

But when I want to take this information that i've stored and break it back into 3 parts, how do I do it?

ex) $date = October 14, 2006

I want it seperate out to $month=october $day=14 and $year=2006...

Second Issue: Opinion
Did I make this too complicated? Is there an easier way to store selected dates in a database and retrieving them for updating? (I don't want to store "current" date.

[MCP]

First Issue:
You can use:

list($month,$day,$year)=preg_split("/[,\s]/",$date); // (untested!)

or you can use the strtotime() function, which will convert it to a php datetime, and then do whatever you need to (maybe using date() to reformat or whatever)

Second Issue:
MySQL has a datetime format, which is probably the best to use. Then, if you use MySQL's UNIX_TIMESTAMP function when selecting rows, it'll automatically be in PHP's format...

For more information, there are tons of tutorials on the net, such as this one (not that I've used it, but a quick search yielded this) http://www.devshed.com/c/a/MySQL/Practical-Date-Time-examples-with-PHP-and-MySQL/

[rinoa04]

You can use substr(strings, begin, length) to separate the strings. Here are the exampe:

Assume that date store in database is in this format: 2005-02-10

Retrieve the date from the database and store into a variable $date.

$year = substr($date, 0, 4);
$month = substr($date, 5, 2);
$day = substr($date, 8, 2);

Note: You must ensure the length and format of your date are same. Otherwise it will retrieve the different value under the same location.