PHP Date Format

PHP date format describes how to display PHP date and what it should look like. In the PHP date article, we discussed how to create and format dates in PHP generally. In this tutorial, we are going to discuss how to format the date specifically.

PHP date_format() Function

The first and simple way to format the date is by using the date_format() function.

date_format(date, format);

This function does not use locales. This function is available in PHP 5.2 and higher.

$date = date_create("2022-03-18");
echo date_format($date, "Y/m/d H:i:s");

Output

2022/03/18 00:00:00

In the example, we used a string of English characters to specify the format. The characters definition is:

• d – The day of the month (from 01 to 31)
• D – A textual representation of a day (three letters)
• j – The day of the month without leading zeros (1 to 31)
• l (lowercase ‘L’) – A full textual representation of a day
• N – The ISO-8601 numeric representation of a day (1 for Monday, 7 for Sunday)
• S – The English ordinal suffix for the day of the month (2 characters st, nd, rd or th. Works well with j)
• w – A numeric representation of the day (0 for Sunday, 6 for Saturday)
• z – The day of the year (from 0 through 365)
• W – The ISO-8601 week number of the year (weeks starting on Monday)
• F – A full textual representation of a month (January through December)
• m – A numeric representation of a month (from 01 to 12)
• M – A short textual representation of a month (three letters)
• n – A numeric representation of a month, without leading zeros (1 to 12)
• t – The number of days in the given month
• L – Whether it’s a leap year (1 if it is a leap year, 0 otherwise)
• o – The ISO-8601 year number
• Y – A four-digit representation of a year
• y – A two-digit representation of a year
• a – Lowercase am or pm
• A – Uppercase AM or PM
• B – Swatch Internet time (000 to 999)
• g – 12-hour format of an hour (1 to 12)
• G – 24-hour format of an hour (0 to 23)
• h – 12-hour format of an hour (01 to 12)
• H – 24-hour format of an hour (00 to 23)
• i – Minutes with leading zeros (00 to 59)
• s – Seconds, with leading zeros (00 to 59)
• u – Microseconds (added in PHP 5.2.2)
• e – The timezone identifier (Examples: UTC, GMT, Atlantic/Azores)
• I (capital i) – Whether the date is in daylights savings time (1 if Daylight Savings Time, 0 otherwise)
• O – Difference to Greenwich time (GMT) in hours (Example: +0100)
• P – Difference to Greenwich time (GMT) in hours:minutes (added in PHP 5.1.3)
• T – Timezone abbreviations (Examples: EST, MDT)
• Z – Timezone offset in seconds. The offset for timezones west of UTC is negative (-43200 to 50400)
• c – The ISO-8601 date (e.g. 2013-05-05T16:34:42+00:00)
• r – The RFC 2822 formatted date (e.g. Fri, 12 Apr 2013 12:01:05 +0200)
• U – The seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT)

and the following predefined constants can also be used (available since PHP 5.1.0):

• DATE_ATOM – Atom (example: 2013-04-12T15:52:01+00:00)
• DATE_COOKIE – HTTP Cookies (example: Friday, 12-Apr-13 15:52:01 UTC)
• DATE_ISO8601 – ISO-8601 (example: 2013-04-12T15:52:01+0000)
• DATE_RFC822 – RFC 822 (example: Fri, 12 Apr 13 15:52:01 +0000)
• DATE_RFC850 – RFC 850 (example: Friday, 12-Apr-13 15:52:01 UTC)
• DATE_RFC1036 – RFC 1036 (example: Fri, 12 Apr 13 15:52:01 +0000)
• DATE_RFC1123 – RFC 1123 (example: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:52:01 +0000)
• DATE_RFC2822 – RFC 2822 (Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:52:01 +0000)
• DATE_RFC3339 – Same as DATE_ATOM (since PHP 5.1.3)
• DATE_RSS – RSS (Fri, 12 Aug 2013 15:52:01 +0000)
• DATE_W3C – World Wide Web Consortium (example: 2013-04-12T15:52:01+00:00)

This function is an alias of the DateTime::format().

$date = date_create("2022-03-18");
echo $date->format("Y-m-d H:i:s");

Output

2022-03-18 00:00

In this example, we changed the “/” character with “-” to display the date. You can use any character between the items or not at all.

You can use the format characters with your favorite order.

$date = date_create("2022-03-18");
echo $date->format("Y-i-d H:m:s");

Output

2022-00-18 00:03:00

In this example, we put minutes between the year and the day, and the month between the hour and second.

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