Getting day of week out of datestamp

I currently have a datestamp in the format yyyymmdd. I want to pull the day of the week (Monday, Tuesday, etc...) out of that datestamp at any given time.

Currently my code looks like this:
$datearray = getdate($firstdatestamp);
echo $datearray["weekday"];
When $firstdatestamp = 20000501 (or the first of May, 2000) the weekday returned is Thursday when really it should be Monday!

I tried:
echo date("l", time());
and it gives me the right weekday but only for the current date. I need to pass this my datestamp and am not too sure how.

Please help!!!!!

Thanks,
Stephanie Lemaire

Are you pulling this from a database? If so, many db engines have date functions that'll do that.

Yes actually, my data is coming from a MySQL database.

I did figure out the reason it wasn't working was because my datestamp wasn't in proper UNIX format, so I develop a new datestamp out of the old one and process that.

A cleaner way would be nice though

Thanks,
Stephanie

select dayname(date_field_name) as dayname from table;

I would put the date into a unix timestamp when you pull it from the database. That way you can use the date function on it at any time to manipulate into the format you would like whether it be day of the week or whatever.

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica">code:</font><HR><pre>
$result = mysql_query("SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(my_date_field) FROM my_table");
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);
$my_unix_date = $row["UNIX_TIMESTAMP"];
$day_of_week = date("l", $my_unix_date);
[/code]

Dear Stephanie,

If you want to pull day of the week out in any given time you can use built-in function from MySQL, ex:

SELECT dayname("20000602");
return value:
+---------------------+
| dayname("20000602") |
+---------------------+
| Friday |
+---------------------+

best regards,
Tata