How can I use PHP to display a MYSQL datetime value without displaying the seconds?

• How can I strip the seconds off when displaying a MYSQL datetime variable, using only PHP commands, not MYSQL commands like "DATE_FORMAT"? I have a form where users enter a few dates and times. I don't care about seconds, just the year, month, day, hours, minutes. I'm using PHP with MYSQL, and the MYSQL values are in datetime format. When I display the contents of those variables, it shows them as, for example: 2006/11/28 17:26:00 What I would like displayed is: 2006/11/28 17:26 I know this can be done with the DATE_FORMAT command in a MYSQL query, but the problem is that I have quite a few queries, all in the form of "SELECT * FROM table WHERE blahblahblah" (which gathers lots of other information besides datetimes), and if I make separate queries in the form "SELECT DATE_FORMAT (startTime, blahblahblah) AS startTime" for all the time values I call up, I'm going to be making my code much longer and harder for other people (who, like myself, are non-programmers with limited PHP knowledge) to work on. Is there any way that's relatively clean/simple on the PHP end to take, for example, a variable called $startTime, with a value like "2006-11-11 12:13:00", and display it on a page as "2006-11-11 12:13"? Yes, I have Googled like a motherfucker, but to no avail.

• Answer:

  And converting to a unix timestamp can be done with strtotime, like so: date("Y/m/d H:m", strtotime($your_mysql_datevar));