how to format dates using php + mysql

check out the date_format() function of MySQL:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/date-and-time-functions.html#function_date-format

can i do it in php?

Why you want to do it in PHP? Anyway take a look at this http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.datetime.php

Change the datetime field to a date field, this will eliminate the 00:00:00 portion of the field.

Then I would format it using PHP, it's slightly faster.

$sql = "select date_field from table;";
$rs = mysql_query($sql);
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($rs)) {
      $formated_date = date("d/m/Y", strtotime($row['date_field']);
      echo $formated_date;
}

@nplib
Is it faster to format the date in PHP rather than MySQL? How?

>can i do it in php?

yes. strtotime() will get the time value from the string yyyy-mm-dd.
then, with the date() function, you can format it to the format you want

@wasifg
just the way sql severs process commands.

I'm not to sure why it is, but I have a table that has 3000+ records, and when I do it with date_format() it takes 0.05 seconds to return all, and when I do it without it takes 0.005 seconds, although both real fast, doing the php way is marginably faster, that's why I said slightly.