date woes

[eluser]tim1965[/eluser]
Firstly apologies for posting this issue here. Its not a CI problem but it is driving me nuts so i thought i would take a scatter gun approach and hit all the good forums.
This is such a simple thing that i cant believe i havent found an answer to it after 3 hrs.

Ok onto the problem. I have a date field in MySql type DATE and default set to NULL. If a date is not entered the default value for NULL that is being applied is 0000-00-00.
All well and good. However when i try and display the date using

Code:

echo strftime("%d-%m-%y", strtotime($start_date)

The date is being interpreted correctly by the function as

01-01-70

.
Mt problem is that i just want a blank field.
I am sure that this is a problem that lots of people have run into before, but i cannot find anything about how to handle it.
Any help much appreciated.

[eluser]umefarooq[/eluser]
for you problem if you want to format date dd,mm,yy you just use mysql date_format() function in query it very handy and fast to convert the date in you desired format or check CI documentation for date helper

CI doc
http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-gui...elper.html

mysql
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/d...ate-format

or

http://www.w3schools.com/SQL/func_date_format.asp

[eluser]tim1965[/eluser]
umefarooq

Many thanks for ths response. I was trying to be too clever in what i was trying to do, hence i was getting confused. I could not use the CI helper stuff as this is a legacy system and stores dates as dates.
However as always go with the simplest solution which was an explode of the string.

Many thanks again.