PHP can generate today date and time in different formats for use in different applications. PHP date function returns date with a given format along with time. Here is a simple date command in PHP to display today date.
date("date format",[timestamp])

The output of the above command is: 05/17/08

Use of PHP timestamp in the date function is optional. To display the date in above format we have used the date format like this
date("m/d/y")

This will format the display to month / day / year format. We can change the display to any other format we want with use of different characters to format the string. You will get a list of such characters used for formating the date is listed at the end of this page.

Related Tutorial

• PHP Date Format • PHP Time Stamp • Time Stamp Generator

Let us display the todays date with the present time using the date format characters in a better way.
May 17, 2008, 9:27 am

Refresh your browser window to see how the time is changing. Here is the code used to display the above date and time.
date("F j, Y, g:i a")

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