How to display proper date on external website

[pete_k104]

Hello!

I've been working on getting a simple news display script to properly display the time, but to not avail. I'm getting December 31, 1969 (UNIX epoch - 1).

I'm doing a simple script that's just pulling all the newest entries in the thread table. It's getting the userid from the post table, and is displaying a custom field I made (that is meant for full/real name) from the userfield table (field5).

The code worked perfectly fine with a vbb 3.5.4 installation, and I see no difference between the two, other than mysql table structure. Dateline is the same entity in both 3.5.x and 3.6.x

I was decoding it using

PHP Code:

$date = date("m, d, Y", $date); 


in each array object using the posts -> dateline value to show the date of the post. Dateline is stored as unixtime, based on the original Unix Epoch.

$date would be called in my array as

PHP Code:

$date = $line['dateline']; 


Now, I've tried just making a bare script to take a dateline i feed it from the url to even test the date, and still no go.

I'm 100% sure it's not the server time, as I can successfully use

PHP Code:

date("m d Y"); 


I can also successfully feed it a dateline from vbb 3.5.4 and have a successful date echo.

My best guess is that date() cannot do the math properly against the unix epoch, and it is returning as -1, hence December 31, 1969. The reason why? My best guess is that vbb 3.6 stores dateline in a new format that date() cannot properly read.

Is my guess correct in saying that I must add a mathematical formula to have date() properly do the math against the epoch?