title: How to change carbon date type to string?
body: <p>Edit: So I changed the title of my question. it was :Is built in timestamps for users migration different than other migrations we create in Laravel?</p>
  
  <p>Ok here's the thing. Laravel out of the box had users migration. so I did not create any. and I needed an invoices table so I made a migration for that. Here are the two :</p>
  
  <pre><code>class CreateUsersTable extends Migration
  {
  /**
   * Run the migrations.
   *
   * @return void
   */
  public function up()
  {
      Schema::create('users', function (Blueprint $table) {
          $table-&gt;increments('id');
          $table-&gt;string('name');
          $table-&gt;string('email')-&gt;unique();
          $table-&gt;string('password', 60);
          $table-&gt;rememberToken();
          $table-&gt;timestamps();
      });
  }
  
  /**
   * Reverse the migrations.
   *
   * @return void
   */
  public function down()
  {
      Schema::drop('users');
  }
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Invoices Migration :</p>
  
  <pre><code>class CreateInvoicesTable extends Migration
  {
  
  public function up()
  {
      Schema::create('invoices', function (Blueprint $table) {
          $table-&gt;unsignedInteger('id')-&gt;unique();
          $table-&gt;unsignedInteger('user_id')-&gt;index();
          $table-&gt;longText('url');
          $table-&gt;timestamps();
  
          $table-&gt;foreign('user_id')-&gt;references('id')-&gt;on('users');
      });
  }
  
  /**
   * Reverse the migrations.
   *
   * @return void
   */
  public function down()
  {
      Schema::drop('invoices');
  }
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I put some initial data there. now when I vardump created_at for each of them I get different results!! I just tested like below and the results are :</p>
  
  <pre><code>foreach ($users as $user)
      {
          return var_dump($user-&gt;created_at);
      }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The result is : </p>
  
  <pre><code>object(Carbon\Carbon)#185 (3) { ["date"]=&gt; string(19) "2015-11-08 14:50:29" ["timezone_type"]=&gt; int(3) ["timezone"]=&gt; string(11) "Asia/Tehran" } 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But for the invoices :</p>
  
  <pre><code>foreach ($invoices as $invoice)
      {
          return var_dump($invoice-&gt;created_at);
  
      }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I get this :</p>
  
  <pre><code>string(19) "2015-11-09 11:15:55" 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>now I don't really care why is that. How can I change the users timestamps created_at to be string. cause I have a function for date conversion that works perfectly on Invoices or any other data I got but for the users I get errors.</p>
  
  <p>Any help would be appreciated. Thank you very much.</p>