PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual Quickpro Guide, Second Edition

Date and Time Functions

Changing the direction of the chapter just a bit, I’ll introduce a couple of PHP’s date- and time-related functions. The most important of these is the aptly named date() function, which returns a string of text for a certain date and time according to a format you specify.

date ('format', [timestamp]);

The timestamp is an optional argument representing the number of seconds since the Unix Epoch (midnight on January 1, 1970) for the date in question. It allows you to get information, like the day of the week, for a particular date. If a timestamp is not specified, PHP will just use the current time on the server.

There are myriad formatting parameters available (Table 3.1), and these can be used in conjunction with literal ...