Dates and Times in PHP
Now, we want to display that timestamp in a human readable format. To do that we have to understand the date(); function. This date function is used to convert from a UNIX timestamp to a human readable date. The date function is:
string date ( string format [, int timestamp])
You can see that the timestamp is rounded by ‘[’ and ‘]’, that means it’s optional. If we put it then the function will use it and if we don’t put it then the function will use the default timestamp. The default timestamp which is used when we don’t put any timestamp is the current time.
Let’s start our work with the date function. We want to show the user what date and time is now.
print date(”l, F jS Y - H:i:s”);
As you can see on the example above, I use l, F jS Y - H:i:s as the variable passed to the function. Here is a list of formatting characters used:
F - month, textual, long; e.g. “January”
H - hour, 24-hour format; i.e. “00″ to “23″
i - minutes; i.e. “00″ to “59″
j - day of the month without leading zeros; i.e. “1″ to “31″
l (lowercase ‘L’) - day of the week, textual, long; e.g. “Friday”
s - seconds; i.e. “00″ to “59″
S - English ordinal suffix for the day of the month, 2 characters; i.e. “st”, “nd”, “rd” or “th”
Y - year, 4 digits; e.g. “1999″
