Date manipulate question

[eluser]Daniel_E9[/eluser]
I have a function in my model that gets everything from a database table and returns it. I then use this code to put my data into my template.

Code:

$article = $this->article->get_articles();
$this->parser-parse('index', array('article', $article));

Basically, one of the values I am getting is a field from the database with datetime. How do I amend that using date('y'm'd') etc before it goes into the parser?

Should be simple but I can't get it to work, thanks.