What are some best practices for handling datetime values in PHP queries for sorting purposes?

When handling datetime values in PHP queries for sorting purposes, it is important to ensure that the datetime values are stored in a format that can be easily sorted. One common approach is to store datetime values in a standardized format such as 'Y-m-d H:i:s' (e.g., '2022-01-15 14:30:00'). When querying the database, you can use the ORDER BY clause to sort the results based on the datetime column. 

// Sample query to retrieve data sorted by datetime column
$query = "SELECT * FROM table_name ORDER BY datetime_column ASC";
$result = mysqli_query($connection, $query);

// Loop through the results
while ($row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result)) {
    // Access datetime value and format as needed
    $datetime = date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime($row['datetime_column']));
    // Output or process the sorted data
    echo $datetime . "<br>";
}

Keywords

datetime PHP queries sorting timezone date functions

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