date_format function for Formatting returned date field data of MYSQL table

Formatting MYSQL date value

We can directly get date format from mysql table by using date_format function of mysql. Here we will not use any php side function to get date format. Here is the basic syntax to get the date format from mysql table.

SELECT date_format( dt, '%m/%d/%Y %T' ) as my_date FROM dt_tb

Here dt_tb is the table name and dt is the field name. You can see the formatting is done like this 'm/%d/%Y %T' . This formatting we can change to display date in different formats . Here are some of the formats and different possible values.

'%W %D %M %Y %T'	Wednesday 5th May 2004 23:56:25
'%a %b %e %Y %H:%i'	Wed May 5 2004 23:56
'%m/%d/%Y %T'	05/05/2004 23:56:25
'%d/%m/%Y'	05/05/2004
'%m-%d-%y'	04-08-13

You can read about data formatting in mysql query here

Here is the sql code to create and fill the table with records

CREATE TABLE dt_tb ( id int(2) NOT NULL auto_increment, dt datetime NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00', dt2 date NOT NULL default '0000-00-00', PRIMARY KEY (id) ) TYPE=MyISAM; 

 # # Dumping data for table `dt_tb` # 

 INSERT INTO dt_tb VALUES (1, '2004-10-26 00:00:00', '2005-01-25');
 INSERT INTO dt_tb VALUES (2, '2004-05-05 23:56:25', '2005-06-12');
 INSERT INTO dt_tb VALUES (3, '2005-12-08 13:20:10', '2005-06-06');