Question: My intention is to convert the following date 

`20/04/17 13:27:5` 
to this 

`20-04-2017 13:27:05`

I tried the typical date format functions of php and also Carbon...

things like

```
$newDate= Carbon::createFromFormat('d/m/y H:m:s', $originalDate);

```

in this case 
`var_dump($newDate->toDateTimeString())` would bring `2019-03-20 13:00:55` which is not what I expect.

So I was not lucky....is there a way to do this in a straight forward manner?

Answer: 
I think this should work.

```
$date = "20/04/17 13:27:5";
$sec  = substr($date, strrpos($date, ":") + 1);
$sec  = substr("0{$sec}", -2);
$new  = substr($date, 0, strrpos($date, ":") + 1) . $sec;

$newDate = Carbon::createFromFormat('d/m/y H:i:s', $new);

```

I changed the format since you were using `m` twice for "minutes" and "month". It is correct for the month, but not for the minutes. Instead use `i` for minutes with leading zeroes.

`$sec` Is what I used to get the second from the string. This gets the last position of `:` and will take everything after it. *This assumes that you do not change the format of the string*.  

`substr("0{$sec}", -2)` Adds a zero to the current second and extracts the last two characters. That means that `50` becomes `050` and then the last two characters are `50` so we end up without the padding, but `5` becomes `05` and the last two characters are the only characters.

`$new` concatenates the start of the date string and the new second with the zero padding.

`$newDate` is your original string with the format changed.
This is a working conversion routine that creates the ISO format you are looking for. But as already mentioned you need to "fix" the strange way the seconds are specified in the original example you provide. You will have to use string functions if that *really* is the format you receive. Better would be to fix the code that creates such broken formats. 

```
<?php
$input = '20/04/17 13:27:05';
$date = DateTime::createFromFormat('d/m/y H:i:s', $input);
var_dump($date->format('d-m-Y H:i:s'));

```

The output obviously is: 

```
string(19) "20-04-2017 13:27:05"

```