setDate to assign year month and day to date object in PHP

We can assign new date to any date object by using setDate function. Using this we can change the date object.

setDate(Year, month, day)

Here are some examples to set the date.

date_default_timezone_set('America/Chicago');

$today = new DateTime;
echo $today->format('Y-m-d ');
echo "<br>";
$today->setDate(13,11,20);
echo $today->format('Y-m-d');

The output is here

2025-07-20 
0013-11-20

IN above code we can change the setDate function parameters and check the output. We can change to higher values for year and month , the function will adjust it to the next values and display the correct dates. Here are the changes ( only )

$today->setDate(13,14,31);

The output is here

2025-07-20 
0014-03-03

Procedural style

$date = date_create();
date_date_set($date, 2019, 8, 13);
echo date_format($date, 'Y-m-d');

Output is here

2019-08-13

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setDate(): sets the date in an existing DateTime object

Procedural style