Converting a date to a carbon instance from query results

Question

I was recently adding some functionality to a moderation queue that I have. Instead of querying one table, Questionnaire, it is now querying Users to so that I can grab their username.

My previous query was just

$questionnaire = Questionnaire::all();

And then when I accessed this on the page I could format it like so:

{{ $questionnaire->created_at->format('F d, Y h:ia') }}

This is how my new query looks in my controller:

public function moderate()
    {
        $questionnaires = DB::table('users')
                        ->join('questionnaire', 'users.id', '=', 'questionnaire.memberid')
                        ->select('users.username', 'questionnaire.*')
                        ->get();
        return view('questionnaire.moderate', ['questionnaires' => $questionnaires]);
    }

However when I try to access the created_at date on the page now I get a Call to a member function format() on a non-object error. My digging leads me to believe this is because the date isn't converted to a carbon instance.

However all the documentation on Carbon is for when you're just pulling the date and I'm struggling to figure out how to convert it after I get the query results so that I can still access it on the page.

Can anyone hel?

Answer 1

According to the Carbon API, you can create a Carbon instance like so:

$myDate = new Carbon($questionnaire->created_at);

And then just format it the way you want:

{{ $myDate->format('F d, Y h:ia') }}

It may not be exactly what you want, but it'll work.

P.S: your Questionnaire model has the created_at field inside the $dates attribute? I thought that was just enough, even accessing the data the way you are doing it now.