Date and Time Functions in PHP
If you are a web developer then you have probably worked with PHP functions for acquiring the current date and time, manipulating dates, and formatting dates for display. However, if you are working with dates and times in PHP, you should always keep factors like time zones, daylight saving, and localization in mind. These factors can affect the accuracy and functionality of your scripts, so it’s important to understand them.
PHP provides methods for acquiring and storing the date and time, formatting dates and their parts, and managing timezones and calendar functions. These functions can help you increase the efficiency of your applications and make sure that they function correctly in different regions and languages.
To get the current date and time, you can use the date() function. This will return the server’s current time in a format specified by the user. However, you should be aware that the date() function does not return client time, but rather the timestamp of the date and time the server machine received at startup.
Another function that allows you to get the current date and time is the strtotime() function. This is a powerful function that can turn a human-readable date string into a timestamp, which represents the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970 (also known as the Unix epoch).
The strtotime() function also has many different parameters that you can use to format the date and time according to your requirements. For example, you can use the h, i, and s parameters to specify the hour, minute, and second parts of the date. You can also use the a, b, c, and d parameters to set whether the format should include uppercase antemeridian and post-meridian (AM or PM).