PHP date and time

How to get the time in PHP?

First, we will see what the familiar characters we use for times are -

• The ‘H’ character represents the 24-hour format of an hour (00 to 23).
• The 12-hour format (01 to 12) with leading zeros is characterized by the ‘h’ character.
• Minutes with leading zeros (00 to 59) is characterized by ‘i’ character.
• Seconds with leading zeros (00 to 59) are represented by ‘s’ character.
• We get lowercase Ante meridiem and Post meridiem (am or pm) by the character ‘a’.
• We get uppercase Ante meridiem and Post meridiem (AM or PM) by the character ‘A’.

Now we'll see an example for getting current time in a particular format -

<?php
echo "<h2>Coding ninja</h2></br>";
echo "The time is " . date("H:i:sa");
?>

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Output-

What is automatic copyright year in PHP?

This is one of the applications of the date() function in which we can automatically update the copyright year of our website.

<?php 
echo "<h2>Coding ninja</h2></br> &copy; 2010-"; echo date("Y");
?>

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Output-

How can we get our own timezone in PHP?

When our server is in another country or set up for a different timezone, the code shows us the wrong time. But if we want the time of our location or any specific location, we can set the timezone we wish to.

For example -

<?php
echo "<h2>Coding ninja</h2></br>";
date_default_timezone_set("America/New_York");
echo "The time is " . date("h:i:s a");
?>

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Output-

Here we have given America/New_York value to the function date_default_timezone_set() to set the timezone to America/New_York, and the location's current time in a specific format is displayed as output.

How can we create a Date with mktime()?

For creating a timestamp for a specific date and time, we use the time() function. If we don't offer a particular date and time parameter, the current date and time will be provided. Unix timestamp for a date is returned by mktime() function. It calculates the number of seconds between the time specified and Unix Epoch (January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 GMT) and gives output.

Here is the syntax of the function -

mktime(hour, minute, second, month, day, year)

 example -

<?php
echo "<h2>Coding ninja</h2></br>";
echo mktime(22, 21, 53, 11, 25, 2017);
?>

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Output-

Timestamp for November 25, 2017,22 hrs, 21 mins, 53secs is created by this code.

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Frequently Asked Questions

1.What is another way of getting time without using PHP's date() function?

Ans: We can use the time() function for getting the time in UNIX timestamp.

<?php
$timestamp = time();
echo "<h2>Coding ninja</h2></br>";
echo($timestamp);
echo "</br>";
echo(date("F d, y h:i:s A", $timestamp));
?>

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Output-

2.How can we create a date from a string with strtotime()?

Ans: PHP's strtotime() function converts the human-readable date and time string format to UNIX timestamp format. The syntax of the function is strtotime(time, now).

<?php
echo "<h2>Coding ninja</h2></br>";
$d=strtotime("10:30pm April 15 2014");
echo "Created date is " . date("Y-m-d h:i:sa", $d);
?>

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Output-

Key Takeaways

Don't come to a halt here. Check out our PHP Interview questions: Part 1 | Coding Ninjas Blog. Can you also check out the Why Use PHP programming in 2021? Its Pros and Cons | Coding Ninjas Blog blog. Check out more blogs, including software testing, security testing, etc., here.