Date and time in PHP

In this tutorial you will learn how to set the timezone in a PHP program and how to store and display the current date and time like what you see below.

There are a range of different timezones you can use in PHP as well as date/time formats. The links below provide a list of timezones and date/time formats in the PHP manual:

• List of supported timezones in PHP
• Date/time formats in PHP

Watch the video below and then scroll down to see the sample code from the video as well as a table containing the most commonly used date/time formats.

Sample PHP code:

<?php
  // set timezone
  date_default_timezone_set('Australia/Sydney');
  
  // display the date and time with a greeting

  function show_date(){
    return date('l, jS F H:i');
  }

  function greeting(){
    $hour = date('H');
    if($hour < 12){
      $greeting = "Good morning!";
    }
    else{
      $greeting = "Good day!";
    }
    return $greeting;
  }

  echo show_date();
  echo "<br/>" . greeting();
?>

List of commonly used date/time formats:

Argument	Description	Example
Y	Year displayed as 4 digits	2016
y	Year displayed as 2 digits	16
n	Month displayed as 1 or 2 digits	9
m	Month displayed as 2 digits	09
F	Full name of the month	December
M	Name of the month as 3 letters	Dec
j	Day displayed as 1 or 2 digits	3
d	Day displayed as 2 digits	03
l	Full name of the weekday	Thursday
D	First three letters of weekday	Thu
S	Ordinal suffix displayed as 2 letters	eg. rd or th or nd
H	Hour in 24hr time	17
h	Hour in 12hr time	5
i	Minutes	30
s	Seconds	50
a	am/pm lowercase	am
A	AM/PM uppercase	PM