Getting names of month, weekday day of future or past dates

 // Month is August, Date is 15, Year is 2008
$d_var=getdate(mktime(0,0,0,8,15,2008));
echo "Month name in Full = $d_var[month]<br>";
echo "Month in numeric = $d_var[mon]<br>";
echo "Day of the Week, numeric = $d_var[wday]<br>";
echo "Day of the Week, Full name = $d_var[weekday]<br>";
echo "Day of the month = $d_var[mday]<br>";
echo "Day of the year = $d_var[yday]<br>";
echo "Day of the year = $d_var[year]<br>";

From any date we can get other details like month name , weekday, month number, weekday number, day of the month etc. by using getdate() function in PHP. This function takes time stamp of the required date as input and returns an array of details for that date.

"mday" - day of the month
"wday" - day of the week, numeric (1 for Monday)
"mon" - month, numeric (08 for August)
"year" - year, numeric - like 2008
"yday" - day of the year, numeric; i.e. "256"
"weekday" - day of the week, textual, full; i.e. "Friday"
"month" - month, textual, full; i.e. "August"
"seconds"
"minutes"
"hours"

By taking time stamp as input we can also use date() function to get the month name, day of the week etc. of any date value. This we will discuss at the second part of this tutorial. Now let us discuss on getting date details of any future or past using getdate() function.

Here is the syntax of getdate() function.

$d_var=getdate([timestamp]);

Here timestamp is he optional argument by which we have to give the timestamp of the required date. By default it takes the current date and time as time stamp. Getdate function returns an array with different elements listed here.

You can see how the above code is used to get different values of a date. Here mktim() function is used to generate time stamp of the given date with hour, minute and second values and then the same time stamp is used as input to getdate function to get the date array.

After getting the timestamp of the required date with time. We can use date function to get all details of the particular date.

Here is the code

$tm=mktime(0,0,0,8,15,2008);
echo date("M",$tm);

The above code will print Aug as month name for the given date value. We can use different date formats inside the date function to get desired date part value as per requirement.
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Subhendu Mohapatra

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Finding month, weekday, day of the year for any date value

Subhendu Mohapatra