How to work with dates in PHP

How to date in PHP #

You can use the date function to get the current date.

// Current : 
date('d'); // day
date('m'); // month
date('Y'); // year
date('l'); // day of week
date('h'); // hours
date('i'); // minutes
date('s'); // seconds
date('a'); // am or pm

echo date('Y/m/d');  // to print in a format

Define timezone #

Just remember to set your timezone before calling the date() function so that it fits with the content you want to use.

 date_default_timezone_set('Europe/Paris');

Timestamps #

Timestamps are an easy way to

Create a timestamp with number of seconds since epoch time. Epoch time or Unix epoch refers to the number of seconds that have passed since January 1st 1970. It is an arbitrary date used very often by programmers to add or subtract dates easily.

To create a timestamp, you can use the function mktime() and pass it the arguments as you can see below.

Note that if you run the date() function on the mktime() functio, you turn it into a date.

$timestamp = mktime($seconds, $minutes, $hours, $day, $month, $year);
echo date("m-d-Y", $timestamp); // takes timestamp turns it into date

String to timestamp #

PHP is intelligent enough that you can pass it a string with a date and it will return the timestamp when you use the function strtotime().

echo strtotime('January 10, 2020'); // will print unix timestamp

This should allow you to manipulate dates and even build an interactive calendar. After all, all you need is to be able to add and subtract dates by turning them into timestamps and then turning them back to dates.