Note 1: You don't have to know PHP programming to do this tutorial.
Note 2: I assume that your server supports files with .php extension. If not, you won't be able to do this tutorial. For more info on how to install PHP on your PC go to PHP.net
Type exactly like below in Notepad or any other HTML Editor and save it as date.php in your localhost.
- Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS
- Programming PHP
- PHP and MySQL Web Development
- PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide
- The Joy of PHP
- PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites
- PHP Cookbook
- PHP & MySQL: The Missing Manual
Let's go through the code, anything between <?php and ?> is considered as a php code by the browser. First we are assigning today's date to a variable called $today, then on the next line we are displaying it to the browser. echo is php code to display any data on the browser.
As you have noticed already, ("d M Y h:i A") is a date format that we have constructed. d is for displaying day, M is for month, and Y is for year, h is for hour and i is for minute, and finally A is for displaying AM or PM.
This is just a one way of displaying the date and time, there are many other forms that you can create yourself. Also there are several different forms of displaying one data, for example you can display the current month as "February" of "Feb" or "02", it is all up to you how you want to display it.
Below is the additional php codes for displaying date and time
| Format | Description | Returned Values |
| a | Lowercase Ante meridiem and Post meridiem | am or pm |
| A | Uppercase Ante meridiem and Post meridiem | AM or PM |
| B | Swatch Internet time | 000 through 999 |
| d | Day of the month, 2 digits with leading zeros | 01 to 31 |
| D | A textual representation of a day, three letters | Mon through Sun |
| F | A full textual representation of a month, such as January or March | January through December |
| g | 12-hour format of an hour without leading zeros | 1 through 12 |
| G | 24-hour format of an hour without leading zeros | 0 through 23 |
| h | 12-hour format of an hour with leading zeros | 01 through 12 |
| H | 24-hour format of an hour with leading zeros | 00 through 23 |
| i | Minutes with leading zeros | 00 to 59 |
| I (capital i) | Whether or not the date is in daylights savings time | 1 if Daylight Savings Time, 0 otherwise. |
| j | Day of the month without leading zeros | 1 to 31 |
| l (lowercase 'L') | A full textual representation of the day of the week | Sunday through Saturday |
| L | Whether it's a leap year | 1 if it is a leap year, 0 otherwise. |
| m | Numeric representation of a month, with leading zeros | 01 through 12 |
| M | A short textual representation of a month, three letters | Jan through Dec |
| n | Numeric representation of a month, without leading zeros | 1 through 12 |
| O | Difference to Greenwich time (GMT) in hours | Example: +0200 |
| r | RFC 822 formatted date | Example: Thu, 21 Dec 2000 16:01:07 +0200 |
| s | Seconds, with leading zeros | 00 through 59 |
| S | English ordinal suffix for the day of the month, 2 characters | st , nd , rd or th . Works well with j |
| t | Number of days in the given month | 28 through 31 |
| T | Timezone setting of this machine | Examples: EST , MDT ... |
| U | Seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT) | See also time() |
| w | Numeric representation of the day of the week | 0 (for Sunday) through 6 (for Saturday) |
| W | ISO-8601 week number of year, weeks starting on Monday (added in PHP 4.1.0) | Example: 42 (the 42nd week in the year) |
| Y | A full numeric representation of a year, 4 digits | Examples: 1999 or 2003 |
| y | A two digit representation of a year | Examples: 99 or 03 |
| z | The day of the year (starting from 0) | 0 through 365 |
| Z | Timezone offset in seconds. The offset for timezones west of UTC is always negative, and for those east of UTC is always positive. | -43200 through 43200 |
