The date() function in PHP formats a local time/date. It returns a string formatted according to the given format string using the given integer timestamp or the current time if no timestamp is given
Syntax
date(format, timestamp)
Parameters
timestamp − An integer Unix timestamp that defaults to the current local time if a timestamp is not given.
format − It specifies how to return the result
d − The day of the month (from 01 to 31)
D − A textual representation of a day (three letters)
j − The day of the month without leading zeros (1 to 31)
l (lowercase 'L') − A full textual representation of a day
N − The ISO-8601 numeric representation of a day (1 for Monday through 7 for Sunday)
S − The English ordinal suffix for the day of the month (2 characters st, nd, rd or th. Works well with j)
w − A numeric representation of the day (0 for Sunday through 6 for Saturday)
z − The day of the year (from 0 through 365)
W − The ISO-8601 week number of year (weeks starting on Monday)
F − A full textual representation of a month (January through December)
m − A numeric representation of a month (from 01 to 12)
M − A short textual representation of a month (three letters)
n − A numeric representation of a month, without leading zeros (1 to 12)
t − The number of days in the given month
L − Whether it's a leap year (1 if it is a leap year, 0 otherwise)
o − The ISO-8601 year number
Y − A four digit representation of a year
y − A two digit representation of a year
a − Lowercase am or pm
A − Uppercase AM or PM
B − Swatch Internet time (000 to 999)
g − 12-hour format of an hour (1 to 12)
G − 24-hour format of an hour (0 to 23)
h − 12-hour format of an hour (01 to 12)
H − 24-hour format of an hour (00 to 23)
i − Minutes with leading zeros (00 to 59)
s − Seconds, with leading zeros (00 to 59)
e − The timezone identifier (Examples: UTC, Atlantic/Azores)
I (capital i) − Whether the date is in daylights savings time (1 if Daylight Savings Time, 0 otherwise)
O − Difference to Greenwich time (GMT) in hours (Example: +0100)
T − Timezone setting of the PHP machine (Examples: EST, MDT)
Z − Timezone offset in seconds. The offset west of UTC is negative, and the offset east of UTC is positive (-43200 to 43200)
c − The ISO-8601 date (e.g. 2004-02-12T15:19:21+00:00)
r − The RFC 2822 formatted date (e.g. Thu, 21 Dec 2000 16:01:07 +0200)
U − The seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT)
Return
The date() function returns a string formatted according to the given format string using the given integer timestamp or the current time if no timestamp is given.
Example
The following is an example −
<?php
date_default_timezone_set('UTC'); echo date("l"); echo "<br>"; echo date('l dS \of F Y h:i:s A'); echo "<br />";
?>Output
Thursday Thursday 11th of October 2018 05:05:34 AM
Example
Let us see another example −
<?php echo date(DATE_RFC822) . "<br>"; echo date(DATE_ATOM,mktime(0,0,0,11,7,2017)); ?>
Output
Thu, 11 Oct 18 05:06:15 +0000 2017-11-07T00:00:00+00:00