无法转换类DateTime的对象

Question

I can see that there are many questions along these lines but I am very confused as to why the following does not work, taken straight from the PHP docs:

$tempDate = DateTime::createFromFormat('j-M-Y', '15-Feb-2009');
echo $tempDate;

The error:

PHP Catchable fatal error: Object of class DateTime could not be converted to string.

In fact every example in the docs gives me this error. Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can't echo the DateTime object directly. You have to use the format method to get the date and / or time part:

$tempDate = DateTime::createFromFormat('j-M-Y', '15-Feb-2009');
echo $tempDate->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');
// NOT echo $tempDate!!!

demo: http://ideone.com/IyqRWj

If you want to see the details of the object (for debug) you can use var_dump:

$tempDate = DateTime::createFromFormat('j-M-Y', '15-Feb-2009');
var_dump($tempDate);