Specifications

Advanced PHP Techniques
P
ART IV
392
In this chapter, we’ll discuss checking and formatting the date and time and converting
between date formats. This is especially important when converting between MySQL and PHP
date formats, UNIX and PHP date formats, and dates entered by the user in an HTML form.
We’ll cover
• Getting the date and time in PHP
• Converting between PHP and MySQL date formats
• Calculating dates
• Using the calendar functions
Getting the Date and Time from PHP
Way back in Chapter 1, “PHP Crash Course,” we talked about using the date() function to get
and format the date and time from PHP. We’ll talk about it and some of PHP’s other date and
time functions in a little more detail now.
Using the date() Function
As you might recall, the date() function takes two parameters, one of them optional. The first
one is a format string, and the second, optional one is a UNIX time stamp. If you don’t specify
a time stamp, then date() will default to the current date and time. It returns a formatted string
representing the appropriate date.
A typical call to the date function could be
echo date(“jS F Y”);
This will produce a date of the format “27
th
August 2000”.
The format codes accepted by date are listed in Table 18.1.
T
ABLE 18.1 Format Codes for PHP’s date() Function
Code Description
a Morning or afternoon, represented as two lowercase characters, either
“am” or “pm”.
A Morning or afternoon, represented as two uppercase characters, either
“AM” or “PM”.
B Swatch Internet time, a universal time scheme. More information is avail-
able at http://swatch.com/internettime/internettime.php3.
d Day of the month as a 2-digit number with a leading zero. Range is from
“01” to “31”.
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