Be part of JetBrains PHPverse 2026 on June 9 – a free online event bringing PHP devs worldwide together.
I need help with refactoring a form. There's one issue left: I'd like to change a date input to dd.mm.yyyy format as the app is in German.
The JavaScript part (I use a date picker) is working fine, but I can't get Laravel to store the correct timestamp:
// $request->entry_date is '10.12.2017' (December 10th, 2017)
$request->entry_date = Carbon::createFromFormat('d.m.Y', $request->entry_date);
// In DDB after update: 2010-12-20 17:00:00
// Expected after update: 2017-12-10 (plus whatever time Carbon adds, I just care about the date)
$client->update($request->all());
The 17:00 in the timestamp makes me suspect Carbon interprets the third and fourth digits of the year as hour, but I checked with the docs: Y is year (four digits), m is month (2 digits), d ist day (2 digits).
What's wrong with my code?
Thanks, Pida
You are probably getting the current UTC time by default. To mitigate this behaviour, you can precede the format with bang (!) to reset:
Carbon::createFromFormat('!d.m.Y', $request->entry_date);
or... use the startOfDay() method:
Carbon::createFromFormat('d.m.Y', $request->entry_date)->startOfDay();
Use mutators https://laravel.com/docs/5.6/eloquent-mutators
Hello, you can use eloquent mutators like this:
public function setEntryDateAttribute($date)
{
$this->attributes['entry_date'] = (new Carbon($date));
}
For more you can reference here: https://laravel.com/docs/5.6/eloquent-mutators
@AlbertMulaki Thank you, that works! But now I wonder why...
I thought a mutator is just a central place to say "Whenever someone tries to set $date as entry date, set new Carbon($date) instead". But that's just what I did manually inside my controller, even using specific functions to handle the format (I tried Carbon::createFromFormat() as well as other approaches).
Where's the difference?
as the function says, it says createFromFormat()but i guess it wasn't the correct format provided by the front end, but by passing the date through the constructor, it will take the date in whatever format, and create a date from it.
I also tried new Carbon($date)inside the controller, so there must be some other reason...
Hmm, i dont know then ahahham sorry :D
Please or to participate in this conversation.