Is there a OO-alternative voor MySQL Date(timestamp) function

Hallo all,
I have a MySQL as backend with the native connector

When working with escapeprocessing = false  then DATE(Timepstamp) works 
fine in  any SQL statement

Isrthere a OO alternative when ecapeprocessing is True  ?

i Tried TO_CHAR (timepstamp, "yy-mm-dd  hh:mm:ss") but this gives a 
error saying that this function is unknown ?

Thanks for any hint

Fernand