Dates

By default the dates will be parsed as a Carbon object (opens new window). You can disable date formatting completly inside import.php by setting dates.enabled to false.

To enable/disable date formatting for a single import, use ->formatDates($boolean, $format)

// Format the dates
$reader->formatDates(true);

// Disable date formatting
$reader->formatDates(false);

// Format dates + set date format
$reader->formatDates(true, 'Y-m-d');

Format dates

By default the dates are not formatted, but returned as a Carbon object. There are a couple of options to format them.

Formatting results after ->get()

Inside your loop you can utilise the Carbon method ->format($dateFormat)

$rows->each(function($row) {

    $created_at = $row->created_at->format('Y-m-d');

});

Setting a default date format

Inside the config you can set a default date format. A Carbon object will no longer be returned.

Or you can use ->setDateFormat()

$reader->setDateFormat('Y-m-d');

Setting custom date columns

Cells which are not Excel formatted dates will not be parsed as a date. To force this behaviour (or to use this with CSV imports), you can set these date columns manually: ->setDateColumns()

$reader->setDateColumns(array(
    'created_at',
    'deleted_at'
))->get();