Why can't I access DateTime->date in PHP's DateTime class?

Question

Using the DateTime class, if I try to run the following code:

$mydate = new DateTime(); echo $mydate->date; 

I'll get back this error message

Notice: Undefined property: DateTime::$date...

Which doesn't make sense because when running var_dump() on the variable $mydate, it clearly shows that this property exists and is publicly accessible:

var_dump($mydate);  object(DateTime)[1]   public 'date' => string '2012-12-29 17:19:25' (length=19)   public 'timezone_type' => int 3   public 'timezone' => string 'UTC' (length=3) 

Is this a bug within PHP or am I doing something wrong? I'm using PHP 5.4.3.

Answer 1

This is a known issue.

Date being available is actually a side-effect of support for var_dump() here – [email protected]

For some reason, you're not supposed to be able to access the property but var_dump shows it anyways. If you really want to get the date in that format, use the DateTime::format() function.

echo $mydate->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');