Working with dates and times is very common in programming, let’s see what PHP provides.

We can get the current timestamp (number of seconds since Jan 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT) using time():

$timestamp = time();  When you have a timestamp you can format that as date using date(), using the format you prefer: echo date('Y-m-d',$timestamp);


Y is the 4-digits representation of the year, m is the month number (with leading zero) and d is the number of day of the month, with leading zero.

See the full list of characters you can use to format the date

We can convert any date into a timestamp using strtotime(), which takes a string with a textual representation of a date and converts it into the number of seconds since Jan 1 1970:

echo strtotime('now');
echo strtotime('4 May 2020');
echo strtotime('+1 day');
echo strtotime('+1 month');
echo strtotime('last Sunday');


..it’s pretty flexible.

For dates it’s common to use libraries that offer a lot more functionality than what the language can. A good option is Carbon.