Let’s see how to convert a date from yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss to yyyymmddhhmmss. This can be useful when you’ll use sort functions for example (such as asort()).

Elegant:

/**
 * Format from "yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss" to "yyyymmddhhmmss"
 */
function plainDate( $d ) 
{
  return( preg_replace( '/(-|:|\040)/', '', $d ) );
}


Obvious:

/**
 * Format from "yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss" to "yyyymmddhhmmss"
 */
function plainDate( $d ) 
{
  return( str_replace( ' ', '', str_replace('-','', str_replace(':', '', $d) ) ) );
}


Insane:

function plainDate( $d ) 
{
  $pd = explode(' ', $d);
  $dd = explode('-', $pd[0]);
  $hp = explode(':', $pd[1]);
  return( $dd[0].$dd[1].$dd[2].$hp[0].$hp[1].$hp[2] );
}