When developing a website with PHP it is often beneficial to report server times and/or dates.  On its own this ability is quite useful, but in combination with further scripting, it allows you to account for time zones, datelines, etc, thus improving the overall user experience.  The popular forums software Vbulletin, for example, supports these functions natively.   Best of all, you can output the current server date/time with the following simple PHP instruction:

This will output: Fri Jan 03, 2003 12:01:21 (or the current date/time)

To change the formatting of the date/time, you only need to change the syntax in the brackets to suit your new purpose.  For example:

- A = Uppercase 12hr time syntax eg. PM
- a = Lowercase 12hr time syntax eg. pm
- D = Day eg. Fri
- d = Day eg. 03
- F = Full Text Month eg. January
- G = Hours in 24 hour format without leading zeros eg. 17
- g = Hours in 12 hour format without leading zeros eg. 7
- H = Hours in 24 hour format with leading zeros eg. 17
- h = Hours in 12 hour format with leading zeros eg. 07
- i = Minutes eg. 29
- M = Month eg. Jan
- m = Month eg. 01
- O = GMT time difference in hours eg. +0400
- S = Day of month suffix eg. st, nd, rd, or th.
- s = Seconds eg. 28
- T = Timezone setting eg. GMT, PST, EST, etc
- t = Total number of days in the month eg. 28, 31, etc.
- U = Seconds since the UNIX epoch eg. 1041604168
- W = Week number in year eg. 42 (42nd week in the year)
- w = numeric representation of the day eg. 1 = monday, 2 = tuesday, etc.
- Y = Year eg. 2003
- y = Year eg. 03
- z = Day of the year eg. 002

A Few Examples
To finish this tutorial there now follows a few examples of standard date/time strings and the values they output. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and good luck with PHP! ;)

* = Don't forget to de-limit any normal letters you want to include with the \ symbol, or else the date/time function will interpret the values as intended date/time syntax. 

- Tutorial written by Paul Dawson

Automatic Translations: