date Format a local time/date &reftitle.description; stringdate stringformat inttimestamp Returns a string formatted according to the given format string using the given integer timestamp or the current time if no timestamp is given. In other words, timestamp is optional and defaults to the value of time. &reftitle.parameters; format The format of the outputted date string. See the formatting options below. format character Description Example returned values Day --- --- d Day of the month, 2 digits with leading zeros 01 to 31 D A textual representation of a day, three letters Mon through Sun j Day of the month without leading zeros 1 to 31 l (lowercase 'L') A full textual representation of the day of the week Sunday through Saturday N ISO-8601 numeric representation of the day of the week (added in PHP 5.1.0) 1 (for Monday) through 7 (for Sunday) S English ordinal suffix for the day of the month, 2 characters st, nd, rd or th. Works well with j w Numeric representation of the day of the week 0 (for Sunday) through 6 (for Saturday) z The day of the year (starting from 0) 0 through 365 Week --- --- W ISO-8601 week number of year, weeks starting on Monday (added in PHP 4.1.0) Example: 42 (the 42nd week in the year) Month --- --- F A full textual representation of a month, such as January or March January through December m Numeric representation of a month, with leading zeros 01 through 12 M A short textual representation of a month, three letters Jan through Dec n Numeric representation of a month, without leading zeros 1 through 12 t Number of days in the given month 28 through 31 Year --- --- L Whether it's a leap year 1 if it is a leap year, 0 otherwise. o ISO-8601 year number. This has the same value as Y, except that if the ISO week number (W) belongs to the previous or next year, that year is used instead. (added in PHP 5.1.0) Examples: 1999 or 2003 Y A full numeric representation of a year, 4 digits Examples: 1999 or 2003 y A two digit representation of a year Examples: 99 or 03 Time --- --- a Lowercase Ante meridiem and Post meridiem am or pm A Uppercase Ante meridiem and Post meridiem AM or PM B Swatch Internet time 000 through 999 g 12-hour format of an hour without leading zeros 1 through 12 G 24-hour format of an hour without leading zeros 0 through 23 h 12-hour format of an hour with leading zeros 01 through 12 H 24-hour format of an hour with leading zeros 00 through 23 i Minutes with leading zeros 00 to 59 s Seconds, with leading zeros 00 through 59 u Microseconds (added in PHP 5.2.2) Example: 54321 Timezone --- --- e Timezone identifier (added in PHP 5.1.0) Examples: UTC, GMT, Atlantic/Azores I (capital i) Whether or not the date is in daylight saving time 1 if Daylight Saving Time, 0 otherwise. O Difference to Greenwich time (GMT) in hours Example: +0200 P Difference to Greenwich time (GMT) with colon between hours and minutes (added in PHP 5.1.3) Example: +02:00 T Timezone abbreviation Examples: EST, MDT ... Z Timezone offset in seconds. The offset for timezones west of UTC is always negative, and for those east of UTC is always positive. -43200 through 50400 Full Date/Time --- --- c ISO 8601 date (added in PHP 5) 2004-02-12T15:19:21+00:00 r RFC 2822 formatted date Example: Thu, 21 Dec 2000 16:01:07 +0200 U Seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT) See also time Unrecognized characters in the format string will be printed as-is. The Z format will always return 0 when using gmdate. Since this function only accepts integer timestamps the u format character is only useful when using the date_format function with user based timestamps created with date_create. &date.timestamp.description; &reftitle.returnvalues; Returns a formatted date string. If a non-numeric value is used for timestamp, &false; is returned and an E_WARNING level error is emitted. &reftitle.errors; &date.timezone.errors.description; &reftitle.changelog; &Version; &Description; 5.1.0 The valid range of a timestamp is typically from Fri, 13 Dec 1901 20:45:54 GMT to Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 GMT. (These are the dates that correspond to the minimum and maximum values for a 32-bit signed integer). However, before PHP 5.1.0 this range was limited from 01-01-1970 to 19-01-2038 on some systems (e.g. Windows). &date.timezone.errors.changelog; 5.1.1 There are useful constants of standard date/time formats that can be used to specify the format parameter. &reftitle.examples; ]]> You can prevent a recognized character in the format string from being expanded by escaping it with a preceding backslash. If the character with a backslash is already a special sequence, you may need to also escape the backslash. ]]> It is possible to use date and mktime together to find dates in the future or the past. ]]> This can be more reliable than simply adding or subtracting the number of seconds in a day or month to a timestamp because of daylight saving time. Some examples of date formatting. Note that you should escape any other characters, as any which currently have a special meaning will produce undesirable results, and other characters may be assigned meaning in future PHP versions. When escaping, be sure to use single quotes to prevent characters like \n from becoming newlines. ]]> To format dates in other languages, you should use the setlocale and strftime functions instead of date. &reftitle.notes; To generate a timestamp from a string representation of the date, you may be able to use strtotime. Additionally, some databases have functions to convert their date formats into timestamps (such as MySQL's UNIX_TIMESTAMP function). Timestamp of the start of the request is available in $_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME'] since PHP 5.1. &reftitle.seealso; getlastmod gmdate mktime strftime time