Tag: date

PHP Date() Function

The date() function converts a given timestamp into a readable date format.

Here is the syntax for this function:

Syntax

[code lang=”php”]
date(format,timestamp);
[/code]

Parameters:

format
This parameter determines the format and how the date will read.

For example: “Saturday, Nov. 16th 2009” would be the following code:

[code lang=”php”]
$timestamp = time();
date(“l, M. jS Y”,$timestamp);
[/code]

timestamp
This parameter is the timestamp you want to use to format a date from. This timestamp is a number of seconds since a certain date, since we used the current timestamp of time() we are making the date for the current time.

We’ll break down our example to see what each set of letters represents as part of the date’s format.

  • l – day of the week, textual, long; i.e. ‘Friday’
  • M – month, textual, 3 letters; i.e. ‘Jan’
  • j – day of the month without leading zeros; i.e. ’1′ to ’31′
  • S – English ordinal suffix, textual, 2 characters; i.e. ‘th’,‘nd’
  • Y – year, 4 digits; i.e. ’1999′

View the complete date format reference here.

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PHP Date Formats Reference

Here is a table for formatting the PHP function date() and the letters used to represent different parts of a timestamp.

a ‘am’ or ‘pm’
A ‘AM’ or ‘PM’
B Swatch Internet time
d day of the month, 2 digits with leading zeros; i.e. ’01’ to
’31’
D day of the week, textual, 3 letters; i.e. ‘Fri’
F month, textual, long; i.e. ‘January’
g hour, 12-hour format without leading zeros; i.e. ‘1’ to ’12’
G hour, 24-hour format without leading zeros; i.e. ‘0’ to ’23’
h hour, 12-hour format; i.e. ’01’ to ’12’
H hour, 24-hour format; i.e. ’00’ to ’23’
i minutes; i.e. ’00’ to ’59’
I (capital i) ‘1’ if Daylight Savings Time, ‘0’ otherwise.
j day of the month without leading zeros; i.e. ‘1’ to ’31’
l (lowercase ‘L’) day of the week, textual, long; i.e. ‘Friday’
L boolean for whether it is a leap year; i.e. ‘0’ or ‘1’
m month; i.e. ’01’ to ’12’
M month, textual, 3 letters; i.e. ‘Jan’
n month without leading zeros; i.e. ‘1’ to ’12’
r RFC 822 formatted date; i.e. ‘Thu, 21 Dec 2000 16:01:07 +0200’
(added in PHP 4.0.4)
s seconds; i.e. ’00’ to ’59’
S English ordinal suffix, textual, 2 characters; i.e. ‘th’,
‘nd’
t number of days in the given month; i.e. ’28’ to ’31’
T Timezone setting of this machine; i.e. ‘MDT’
U seconds since the epoch
w day of the week, numeric, i.e. ‘0’ (Sunday) to ‘6’ (Saturday)
Y year, 4 digits; i.e. ‘1999’
y year, 2 digits; i.e. ’99’
z day of the year; i.e. ‘0’ to ‘365’
Z timezone offset in seconds (i.e. ‘-43200’ to ‘43200’). The
offset for timezones west of UTC is always negative, and for those east
of UTC is always positive.
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