PHP Date
Welcome to the PHP Date tutorial, in this tutorial you will learn how to make a date script and also, i will teach you what symbols you can use to put in your date, in each example i have exampled it as a random date so don't be confused.

Step 1: Start Off The PHP Script


Step 2: Add in the date Which would show up with a short day, short month and the year. E.g Mon Jul 2007


Step 3: This would show up as the date in numbers d/m/y E.g 23/07/07


Step 4: This would show up as the full date with the day, the month and year in full E.g July 23 2007


Step 5: This will be saying the number date at the begining adding in a small th, rd or nd at the end. It also includes the Full Month and the year.
E.g 23rd July 2007


Step 6: This is echoing all the dates, this is what will show up on the page.


Step 7: Now we have to end the php script, this will tell the page that we are ending the script.


Enjoy, i have listed some other symbols you can use on your site (As listed form http://www.php.net/date):
Day
d - Day of the month, 2 digits with leading zeros - 01 to 31
D - A textual representation of a day, three letters - Mon through Sun
j - Day of the month without leading zeros - 1 to 31
l (lowercase 'L') - A full textual representation of the day of the week - Sunday through Saturday
N - ISO-8601 numeric representation of the day of the week - 1 (for Monday) through 7 (for Sunday)
S - English ordinal suffix for the day of the month, 2 characters - st, nd, rd or th. Works well with j
w - Numeric representation of the day of the week - 0 (for Sunday) through 6 (for Saturday)
z - The day of the year (starting from 0) - 0 through 365

Week
W - ISO-8601 week number of year, weeks starting on Monday (added in PHP 4.1.0) - Example: 42 (the 42nd week in the year)

Month
F - A full textual representation of a month, such as January or March January through December
m - Numeric representation of a month, with leading zeros - 01 through 12
M - A short textual representation of a month, three letters - Jan through Dec
n - Numeric representation of a month, without leading zeros - 1 through 12
t - Number of days in the given month - 28 through 31

Year
L - Whether it's a leap year - 1 if it is a leap year, 0 otherwise.
o - ISO-8601 year number. This has the same value as Y, except that if the ISO week number (W) belongs to the previous or next year, that year is used instead. (added in PHP 5.1.0) - Examples: 1999 or 2003
Y - A full numeric representation of a year, 4 digits - Examples: 1999 or 2003
y - A two digit representation of a year - Examples: 99 or 03

Enjoy!

Ahh the good ole basics of php programming as it is useful in various programs, such as forums, browser base games, and other various stuff. Although it is interesting to know how to add those suffixes for the dates though.

Above tutorial will show the server date/time. But if you want to display your local time and date in your web site, you need to made few changes. I will try to give you an idea how you can show your local time in your web pages.

At first find out your time zone. Second step is to convert your dime difference into second. Let your local time is GMT + 6 hours, so you have to convert 6 hours into second. Simply use 6*60*60 to convert hours into second.

Now use following codes

[codebox]$ltime = time() + 6*60*60;
$mytime = gmstrftime('%c',$ltime) ;
echo “$mytime”;[/codebox]

This codes will show your local date and time.

You can also display your local date and time in other format and using different codes. For this system you do not need to know your time zone. Fiend out your server time and calculate the difference of your server time and your local time. Now convert you time difference into second. Let your time difference is -3 hours (your local time is 3 hours less from server time). So, simply use – 3*60*60 to adjust your time.

Now place the following codes in your web pages

[codebox]$ltime = time() + 3*60*60 ;
$mytime = date('d.m.y-h:i:s',$ltime);
echo “$mytime”;[/codebox]

These codes will also show your local time.

You may change the date and time format by changing 'd.m.y-h:i:s'. If you want to display date and time in another format change 'd.m.y-h:i:s' section with date/time codes that are listed in previous tutorial.