Format a date inside a class with construct

Question

I'm having some issues with the next problem. I have a function to get all the dates from a SQL table. And I would like to change those dates format to a dd/mm/YY style. I think I should do it through a __construct function, but I'm not able to solve the problem.

This is my current function, which gives me all the dates on the SQL format, YY-mm-dd.

public function get_post($id = null) {
$q = 'SELECT id, date_published FROM posts';
if ($id) {
  $q.=' WHERE id = :id';
}
$stmt = $this->con->prepare($q);
if ($id) {
  $stmt->bindParam(':id', $id);
}
$stmt->execute();
$stmt->setFetchMode(PDO::FETCH_CLASS, 'post');
return $stmt;}

I've tried including a function inside this same function with the __construct, but I don't know how to format the date.

I tried with:

this->date_published = // new formatted date

$date_published = // new formatted date

but those don't work.

Any help will be much appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

Use getters and setters (PHP magic methods):

  public function __get($property, $value) {
    if ($property === "date_published") {
      $this->$property = // new formatted value
    }

    return $this;
  }