PHP Date – Reference

Now that you know the basics of using PHP’s date function, you can easily plug in any of the following letters to format your timestamp to meet your needs.

Important Full Date and Time:

• r: Displays the full date, time and timezone offset. It is equivalent to manually entering
  date(“D, d M Y H:i:s O”)

Time:

• a: am or pm depending on the time
• A: AM or PM depending on the time
• g: Hour without leading zeroes. Values are 1 through 12.
• G: Hour in 24-hour format without leading zeroes. Values are 0 through 23.
• h: Hour with leading zeroes. Values 01 through 12.
• H: Hour in 24-hour format with leading zeroes. Values 00 through 23.
• i: Minute with leading zeroes. Values 00 through 59.
• s: Seconds with leading zeroes. Values 00 through 59.

Day:

• d: Day of the month with leading zeroes. Values are 01 through 31.
• j: Day of the month without leading zeroes. Values 1 through 31
• D: Day of the week abbreviations. Sun through Sat
• l: Day of the week. Values Sunday through Saturday
• w: Day of the week without leading zeroes. Values 0 through 6.
• z: Day of the year without leading zeroes. Values 0 through 365.

Month:

• m: Month number with leading zeroes. Values 01 through 12
• n: Month number without leading zeroes. Values 1 through 12
• M: Abbreviation for the month. Values Jan through Dec
• F: Normal month representation. Values January through December.
• t: The number of days in the month. Values 28 through 31.

Year:

• L: 1 if it’s a leap year and 0 if it isn’t.
• Y: A four digit year format
• y: A two digit year format. Values 00 through 99.

Other Formatting:

• U: The number of seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1, 1970)
• O: This represents the Timezone offset, which is the difference from Greenwich Meridian Time (GMT). 100 = 1 hour, -600 = -6 hours

We suggest that you take a few minutes to create several timestamps using PHP’s mktime function and just try out all these different letters to get your feet wet with PHP’s date function.