This lesson will teach you how to display the current time, formating PHP's timestamp, and show you all the various date arguments for reference purposes.
PHP Date - The Timestamp
The date function always formats a timestamp, whether you supply one or not. What's a timestamp? Good question!
- Timestamp: A timestamp is the number of seconds from January 1, 1970 at 00:00. Otherwise known as the Unix Timestamp, this measurement is a widely used standard that PHP has chosen to utilize.
What Time Is It?
The date function uses letters of the alphabet to represent various parts of a typical date and time format. The letters we will be using in our first example are:
- d: The day of the month. The type of output you can expect is 01 through 31.
- m: The current month, as a number. You can expect 01 through 12.
- y: The current year in two digits ##. You can expect 00 through 99
We'll tell you the rest of the options later, but for now let's use those above letters to format a simple date! The letters that PHP uses to represent parts of date and time will automatically be converted by PHP.
However, other characters like a slash "/" can be inserted between the letters to add additional formatting. We have opted to use the slash in our example.