This article contains various tips for using date in PHP.
Get current date and time with defined format
print date("Y-m-d H:i:s");
print date("m-d-Y");
Starting from PHP 5.2, we can use DateTime class
$timezone = new DateTimeZone('EDT');
$datetime = new DateTime();
$datetime->setTimezone($timezone);
print $datetime->format('Y\-m\-d\ h:i:s');
Get current timestamp
print time();
Convert date time string to timestamp
print strtotime(date('Y-m-d H:i:s'));
Compare date time
1. Convert all to timestamp then compare them as number.
if ( strtotime('2020-01-05') > strtotime(date('Y-m-d', mktime(0, 0, 0, 1, 5, 2020))) )
// do something
2. Convert all to DateTime object then compare
if (new DateTime('2020-01-05') < new DateTime()){
echo 'Left is smaller';
}
Get the last day of a month
PHP date() function can return the number of days in the month of a given date. Just use “t” when providing format to the function.
$d = "2020-12-01";
echo date("t", strtotime($d)); //output: 31