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# date

(PHP 3 <= 3.0.18, PHP 4 >= 4.0.0)

date -- Format a local time/date

## Description

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

Returns a string formatted according to the given format string using the given integer `timestamp` or the current local time if no timestamp is given.

> Note: The valid range of a timestamp is typically from Fri, 13 Dec 1901 20:45:54 GMT to Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 GMT. (These are the dates that correspond to the minimum and maximum values for a 32-bit signed integer.)

> To generate a timestamp from a string representation of the date, you may be able to use strtotime(). Additionally, some databases have functions to convert their date formats into timestamps (such as MySQL's UNIX_TIMESTAMP function).

The following characters are recognized in the format string:

- a - "am" or "pm"

- A - "AM" or "PM"

- B - Swatch Internet time

- d - day of the month, 2 digits with leading zeros; i.e. "01" to "31"

- D - day of the week, textual, 3 letters; i.e. "Fri"

- F - month, textual, long; i.e. "January"

- g - hour, 12-hour format without leading zeros; i.e. "1" to "12"

- G - hour, 24-hour format without leading zeros; i.e. "0" to "23"

- h - hour, 12-hour format; i.e. "01" to "12"

- H - hour, 24-hour format; i.e. "00" to "23"

- i - minutes; i.e. "00" to "59"

- I (capital i) - "1" if Daylight Savings Time, "0" otherwise.

- j - day of the month without leading zeros; i.e. "1" to "31"

- l (lowercase 'L') - day of the week, textual, long; i.e. "Friday"

- L - boolean for whether it is a leap year; i.e. "0" or "1"

- m - month; i.e. "01" to "12"

- M - month, textual, 3 letters; i.e. "Jan"

- n - month without leading zeros; i.e. "1" to "12"

- O - Difference to Greenwich time in hours; i.e. "+0200"

- r - RFC 822 formatted date; i.e. "Thu, 21 Dec 2000 16:01:07 +0200" (added in PHP 4.0.4)

- s - seconds; i.e. "00" to "59"

- S - English ordinal suffix, textual, 2 characters; i.e. "th", "nd"

- t - number of days in the given month; i.e. "28" to "31"

- T - Timezone setting of this machine; i.e. "MDT"

- U - seconds since the epoch

- w - day of the week, numeric, i.e. "0" (Sunday) to "6" (Saturday)

- Y - year, 4 digits; i.e. "1999"

- y - year, 2 digits; i.e. "99"

- z - day of the year; i.e. "0" to "365"

- Z - timezone offset in seconds (i.e. "-43200" to "43200"). The offset for timezones west of UTC is always negative, and for those east of UTC is always positive.

Unrecognized characters in the format string will be printed as-is. The "Z" format will always return "0" when using gmdate().

Example 1. date() example
    echo date ("l dS of F Y h:i:s A");
    echo "July 1, 2000 is on a " . date ("l", mktime(0,0,0,7,1,2000));

You can prevent a recognized character in the format string from being expanded by escaping it with a preceding backslash. If the character with a backslash is already a special sequence, you may need to also escape the backslash.

Example 2. Escaping characters in date()
    echo date("l \\t\h\e jS"); // prints something like 'Saturday the 8th'

It is possible to use date() and mktime() together to find dates in the future or the past.

Example 3. date() and mktime() example
    $tomorrow  = mktime (0,0,0,date("m")  ,date("d")+1,date("Y"));
    $lastmonth = mktime (0,0,0,date("m")-1,date("d"),  date("Y"));
    $nextyear  = mktime (0,0,0,date("m"),  date("d"),  date("Y")+1);

> Note: This can be more reliable than simply adding or substracting the number of seconds in a day or month to a timestamp because of daylight savings time.

Some examples of date() formatting. Note that you should escape any other characters, as any which currently have a special meaning will produce undesirable results, and other characters may be assigned meaning in future PHP versions. When escaping, bu sure to use single quotes to prevent characters like \n from become newlines.

Example 4. date() Formatting
    /* Today is March 10th, 2001, 5:16:18 pm */
    $today = date("F j, Y, g:i a");                 // March 10, 2001, 5:16 pm
    $today = date("m.d.y");                         // 03.10.01
    $today = date("j, m, Y");                       // 10, 3, 2001
    $today = date("Ymd");                           // 20010310
    $today = date('h-i-s, j-m-y, it is w Day z ');  // 05-16-17, 10-03-01, 1631 1618 6 Fripm01
    $today = date('\i\t \i\s \t\h\e jS \d\a\y.');   // It is the 10th day.
    $today = date("D M j G:i:s T Y");               // Sat Mar 10 15:16:08 MST 2001
    $today = date('H:m:s \m \i\s\ \m\o\n\t\h');     // 17:03:17 m is month
    $today = date("H:i:s");                         // 17:16:17

To format dates in other languages, you should use the setlocale() and strftime() functions.

See also getlastmod(), gmdate(), mktime(), strftime() and time().

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