Convert datetime value into string

I am fetching the current date & time using NOW() in mysql. I want to convert the date value into a varchar and concat it with another string. How do I do it?

Use DATE_FORMAT()

SELECT
  DATE_FORMAT(NOW(), '%d %m %Y') AS your_date;

This is super old, but I figured I'd add my 2c. DATE_FORMAT does indeed return a string, but I was looking for the CAST function, in the situation that I already had a datetime string in the database and needed to pattern match against it:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/cast-functions.html

In this case, you'd use:

CAST(date_value AS char)

This answers a slightly different question, but the question title seems ambiguous enough that this might help someone searching.