How to extract the time from "created_at" with Carbon

Question

I am struggling with the Carbon functionalities within Laravel framework still. I created these functions used in my model to extract the date of the "created_at" field in my tables:

public function getCreatedAtAttribute($date) {
    return Carbon::createFromFormat('Y-m-d H:i:s', $date)->format('d.m.Y');
}

This works fine for the date, but how would I need to write a function in this model, that will extract only the time within the created_at field?

Washboard

What version of Laravel are you using? – Compendium

Hi Ross (again :)) I am using Laravel 5.3 – Washboard

Answer 1

I feel like you're limiting yourself a lot be overriding the default behaviour for dates.

If you remove your accessor (getCreatedAtAttribute) you'll be able to call format from the property itself i.e.

$model->created_at->format('d.m.Y')

or

$model->created_at->format('H:i:s');//e.g. 15:30:00

Carbon is just a wrapper for DateTime. For a list of format characters you can look here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php e.g. todays date as 6th February 2016 would be jS F Y

Compendium

Very nice, I never thought this would be posible – Autotrophic

Nice, this is exactly what I want. I use $model->created_at->format('Y-m-d H:i:s'); //e.g. 2018-04-24 14:16:18. – Fredela

Answer 2

try to use

public function getCreatedAtAttribute($date) {
    return Carbon::createFromFormat('Y-m-d H:i:s', $date)->format('H:i:s');
}

output will be time

Apostatize

Answer 3

If you want to insert date into database manually you can do this.

"created_at" => now(),
"updated_at" => now()

debugging

dd(now());


// output
// 2022-03-16 10:24:07

Borderer

Answer 4

$model->created_at

This will use some Eloquent magic and return the creation date as a Carbon object.

Francophobe

True only if the created_at entry is in the protected $dates = [ ]; of a Laravel model – Hafnium

Thank you, but I was asking how to extract specifically the time only – Washboard

Then specify what time means for you please. – Nepos

@TimLewis this is not correct. created_at and updated_at are cast to Carbon by default – Nepos

Yes, because they are in the protected $dates array by default. If you were to remove them from that array, they would not be cast to Carbon. – Hafnium

@TimLewis No, they're not. That functionality is baked into Eloquent. – Compendium

Answer 5

You can create an helper for it. This will allows you to call the getTimeFromCreatedAt() function anywhere in your laravel code.

//extracts time from created_at column
function getTimeFromCreatedAt($date) {
    return Carbon::createFromFormat('Y-m-d H:i:s', $date)->format('H:i:s');
}

Utrillo