How to Convert One Date Format to Another in PHP?

Problem:

You have a date (for ex. in this format, yyyy-mm-dd) and you want to change the date format to another one(ex. mm-dd-yyyy).

Solution:

You can convert date format in PHP in few ways. In the following we’ll discuss two ways.

Method 1: Using strtotime() and date() function

You can convert one date format to another by the following two steps-

1. Use strtotime() function to convert the date to its Unix timestamp, then,
2. Use date() function to create your desired date format from the Unix timestamp.

See the example below-

<?php
$timestamp = strtotime("2014-05-26");
echo date("m-d-Y", $timestamp);
?>

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Output:
05-26-2014

How it works:
strtotime() function takes the date 2014-05-26 as string and converts it to its equivalent timestamp. Then, date() function converts the timestamp to the m-d-Y format.

Method 2: Using createFromFormat() and format() methods of the dateTIme class from SPL

This method is better and smarter solution than the previous one. PHP provides some ready-made classes (called SPL – Standard PHP Library) to solve everyday problems. To solve date related issues, it has DateTime class. We’ll use this class.

<?php
$dateObj = DateTime::createFromFormat('Y-m-d', '2014-05-26');
echo $new_date_format = $dateObj->format('m-d-Y');
?>

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Output:
05-26-2014

How it works: