Handling time and dates in PHP

A timestamp in structure view

Below is an example of a timestamp and how it is structured.

• “2015-11-15 20:34:35”
• Year-Month-Day Hour-Minute-Second
• Y-M-D H-M-S

A timestamp isn't easy to read by humans so we will need to format it.

In the following code example we use the PHP function strtotime() to convert our textual timestamp into a Unix timestamp.

Now that we have a Unix timestamp we can utilise the date() function.

date(desired format, your timestamp)

to format a timestamp into a UK format we  would use date("d/m/y”, your timestamp);

	<?
		$timestamp = "2015-11-15 20:34:35";
		$date = strtotime($timestamp);			
		$formatedDate = date("l d/m/Y",$date);
		$hourMin = date('H:i',$date);
		echo $formatedDate;
		echo '<br />';
		echo $hourMin;
	?>

The above code would output

Sunday 15/11/2015
20:34

Retrieving a timestamp from a MySQL database.

<?php
$dbc = @mysqli_connect(DATABASE_HOST, DATABASE_USER, DATABASE_PASSWORD,
 DATABASE_NAME);
$sql =  mysqli_query($dbc, "SELECT 'date' FROM `table`") or die("Error: ".mysqli_error($dbc));
while($row=mysqli_fetch_array($sql))
{
	$xDate = strtotime($row['DATE']);			
	$yDate = date("d/m/y",$xDate);
	$hourMin = date('H:i',$xDate);
}
?>