Parse and reformat a datetime string

Question

I have a string sent from database, I want to turn it into a date/time string. The source string is:

20110524153631

I want it to be:

2011-05-24 15:36:31

I know I can use multiple inserts but I want to know whether there's a more easy way to do this. How can I achive this?

Answer 1

In PHP 5.3 you can use the DateTime::createFromFormat() method (or its date_create_from_format() alias).

echo DateTime::createFromFormat(
    'YmdHis',
    '20110524153631'
)->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');

For earlier versions (why?) you could play around with the string in any number of boring, or fanciful, ways.

vprintf("%s-%s-%s %s:%s:%s", sscanf("20110524153631", "%4s%2s%2s%2s%2s%2s"));