MySQL DATE_FORMAT() Function

Summary: in this tutorial, you will learn how to use the MySQL DATE_FORMAT() function to format a date value based on a specific format.

Introduction to MySQL DATE_FORMAT function

To format a date value to a specific format, you use the DATE_FORMAT() function. The syntax of the DATE_FORMAT function is as follows:

DATE_FORMAT(date,format)Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

The DATE_FORMAT() function accepts two arguments:

• date : is a valid date value that you want to format
• format : is a format string that consists of predefined specifiers. Each specifier is preceded by a percentage character ( % ). See the table below for a list of predefined specifiers.

The DATE_FORMAT function returns a string whose character set and collation depend on the settings of the client’s connection.

The following table illustrates the specifiers and their meanings that you can use to construct a date format string:

The following are some commonly used date format strings:

MySQL DATE_FORMAT examples

Let’s take a look at the orders table in the sample database.

To select the order’s data and format the date value, you use the following statement:

SELECT 
    orderNumber,
    DATE_FORMAT(orderdate, '%Y-%m-%d') orderDate,
    DATE_FORMAT(requireddate, '%a %D %b %Y') requireddate,
    DATE_FORMAT(shippedDate, '%W %D %M %Y') shippedDate
FROM
    orders;Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

Try It Out

We formatted the order date, required date, and shipped date of each order based on different date formats specified by the format strings.

MySQL DATE_FORMAT with ORDER BY

See the following example:

SELECT 
    orderNumber,
    DATE_FORMAT(shippeddate, '%W %D %M %Y') shippeddate
FROM
    orders
WHERE
    shippeddate IS NOT NULL
ORDER BY shippeddate;Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

Try It Out

In the query, we selected all orders whose shipped dates were not NULL and sorted the orders by the shipped date. However, the orders were not sorted correctly.

The reason is that we used shippeddate as the alias for the output of the DATE_FORMAT function, which is a string, the ORDER BY clause took the alias and sorted the orders based on string values, not date values.

To fix this problem, we have to use an alias that is different from the column name; see the following statement:

SELECT 
    orderNumber,
    DATE_FORMAT(shippeddate, '%W %D %M %Y') 'Shipped date'
FROM
    orders
WHERE
    shippeddate IS NOT NULL
ORDER BY shippeddate;Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

Try It Out

In this tutorial, we have shown you how to use the MySQL DATE_FORMAT function to format the date based on a specified format.