date

(PHP 4, PHP 5)

date — Format a local time/date

Description

string date ( string $format [, int $timestamp ] )

Returns a string generated by integer timestamp according to the given format string. If no timestamp is given, the local current time is used. In other words, timestamp is optional and the default value is time().

Tip

Since PHP 5.1.1 there are several useful constants for specifying the format parameter in standard date/time formats.

Tip

Since PHP 5.1, the timestamp of the time when the request was initiated is saved in $_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME'].

Note:

The typical range of valid timestamps is December 13, 1901 20:45:54 GMT to January 19, 2038 03:14:07 GMT. (This range conforms to the minimum and maximum values of 32-bit signed integers). However, prior to PHP 5.1 this range was limited to January 1, 1970 to January 19, 2038 on some systems such as Windows.

Note:

To convert the time represented by a string into a timestamp, strtotime() should be used. In addition, some databases have functions to convert their time format into timestamps (such as MySQL's » UNIX_TIMESTAMP function).

The format string can recognize the following format parameter string
format character	Description	Return value example
日	---	---
d	The day of the month, a 2-digit number with leading zeros	01 to 31
D	Day of the week, text representation, 3 letters	Mon to Sun
j	The day of the month, without leading zeros	1 to 31
l (lower case letter of “L”)	Day of the week, complete text format	Sunday to Saturday
N	The day of the week represented by numbers in ISO-8601 format (newly added in PHP 5.1.0)	1 (meaning Monday) to 7 (meaning Sunday)
S	The English suffix after the day of the month, 2 characters	st, nd, rd or th. Can be used with j
w	The day of the week, represented by numbers	0 (meaning Sunday) to 6 (meaning Saturday)
z	Day of the year	0 to 366
Week	---	---
W	The week number of the year in ISO-8601 format, each week starts on Monday (new in PHP 4.1.0)	Example: 42 (the 42nd week of the year)
Month	---	---
F	Month, complete text format, such as January or March	January to December
m	The month represented by the number, with leading zeros	01 to 12
M	Month represented by three-letter abbreviation	Jan to Dec
n	Numeric month, without leading zeros	1 to 12
t	The number of days in a given month	28 to 31
Year	---	---
L	Whether it is a leap year	If it is a leap year, it is 1, otherwise it is 0
o	ISO-8601 format year number. This is the same value as Y , except that if the ISO week number (W) belongs to the previous or next year, that year is used. (New in PHP 5.1.0)	Examples: 1999 or 2003
Y	Full 4-digit year	For example: 1999 or 2003
y	2-digit year	For example: 99 or 03
Time	---	---
a	Lowercase AM and PM values	am or pm
A	Capital AM and PM values	AM or PM
B	Swatch Internet Standard Time	000 to 999
g	Hour, 12-hour format, no leading zeros	1 to 12
G	Hour, 24-hour format, no leading zeros	0 to 23
h	Hour, 12 hour format, with leading zeros	01 to 12
H	Hour, 24-hour format, with leading zeros	00 to 23
i	Minutes with leading zeros	00 to 59>
s	Seconds, with leading zeros	00 to 59>
Time Zone	---	---
e	Time zone identifier (new in PHP 5.1.0)	Example: UTC, GMT, Atlantic/Azores
I	Whether it is daylight saving time	1 if it is daylight saving time, 0 otherwise
O	Hours from Greenwich Mean Time	Example: +0200
P	The difference from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), there is a colon separating hours and minutes (newly added in PHP 5.1.3)	Example: +02:00
T	The time zone where this machine is located	For example: EST, MDT ([Translator's Note] In complete text format under Windows, such as "Eastern Standard Time", the Chinese version will display "China Standard Time").
Z	Time difference offset in seconds. Time zone offsets west of UTC are always negative, and time zone offsets east of UTC are always positive.	-43200 to 43200
Full date/time	---	---
c	Date in ISO 8601 format (new in PHP 5)	2004-02-12T15:19:21+00:00
r	Date in RFC 822 format	Example: Thu, 21 Dec 2000 16:01:07 +0200
U	Number of seconds since the Unix epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT)	See time()

Unrecognized characters in the format string will be displayed unchanged. The Z format always returns 0 when using gmdate().