Playing With Dates
This tutorial will teach you the basics on how to use time & date with PHP.
Ever wondered how time works on the internet, very simple actually. All times are measured by the number of seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT).
The measurement is called a timestamp, which contains the large date number.
You can get the timestamp of the current time with the following function:
<?php
$timestamp
= mktime();
?>
Now that we have the timestamp, we can transform it to our favorite format. For this, we’ll need to use the date() function.
Lets see an example:
<?php
$timestamp
= mktime();
// Lets show this format: day - month - year
echo date("d - m - Y", $timestamp);
?>
That was a very dull example, lets have some fun!
<?php
$timestamp
= mktime();
// Shows something like this: Today is Thursday, August 18th, 2005.
echo date("\T\o\d\a\y \i\s l, F jS, Y\.", $timestamp);
?>
As you can see above, if you want to use text within the date function, you must escape each character first with a “\”.
Thats about it, you can play with the formats even more, check out all the formats at PHP.net