How to Convert DateTime to String in PHP

You can represent an exact date and time in PHP using the built-in DateTime object.
Creating one is simple, just pass it a string in the format YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS
.
The problem is that sometimes you want to go from a DateTime object back to a string.
In this post, we'll learn how to convert a DateTime object to a string in PHP.
How to convert a DateTime object to a string
To start, let's create our own DateTime object.
$date = new DateTime('2020-01-01 00:00:00');
The easiest way to convert this back to a readable string is to call the format
method on it and pass it the format in which you want to get the string in.
$date = new DateTime('2020-01-01 00:00:00');
$results = $date->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');
echo($results);
2020-01-01 00:00:00
The useful part about format
is that if the format fails because the DateTime object or the format you passed in is invalid, it will return false
.
Because of this, you can use this check to ensure the formatting was succesful:
$date = new DateTime('2020-01-01 00:00:00');
$results = $date->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');
if ($results) {
echo($results);
} else {
echo('Formatting failed');
}
2020-01-01 00:00:00
Conclusion
In this post, we learned how to convert a DateTime object to a string.
Simply call the format
method on your DateTime object and pass the method the date format you want your DateTime formatted to.
Thanks for reading and happy coding!
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