Learn how to play and use dates with PHP.

This tutorial will teach you the basics on how to use time & date with PHP.

Ever wondered how time works on the internet, very simple actually. All times are measured by the number of seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT).

The measurement is called a timestamp, which contains the large date number.

You can get the timestamp of the current time with the following function:

<?php

$timestamp = mktime();

?>


Now that we have the timestamp, we can transform it to our favorite format. For this, we'll need to use the date() function.

Lets see an example:

<?php

$timestamp = mktime();

// Lets show this format: day - month - year
echo date("d - m - Y", $timestamp);

?>


To view the rest of this tutorial, please click here (http://www.swedesignz.com/php.html?id=11).

- Tomer

There is only 1 more part to this tutorial.
Pointless.

All of this you can see at http://php.net in documentation section

You can also simply use the time() function rather than mktime to get a current UNIX timestamp.

You can also set the users timezone using sentenv() to modify the TZ environment variable

Some of the really cool functions get lost:

http://php.net/strtotime - make a timestamp from man common string date formats

etc

Yes, definetely read the documentation on php.net

The date function has many cool features like returning the number of days in the given month, whether or not the year is a leap, what number week you are in, various text represantations of the day or month.

Lots of fun stuff

Know pretty much all of this, but I bet some people will put this to good use!

I agree. This tutorial was really not needed.