Date('now') in PHP

Question

After a long time I needed to use date function of PHP. I wrote something like:

echo date('now');

and I got the output below:

1220123

What does that mean ?

Answer 1

From the PHP manual :

• n Numeric representation of a month, without leading zeros

• o ISO-8601 year number. This has the same value as Y, except that if the ISO week number (W) belongs to the previous or next year, that year is used instead. (added in PHP 5.1.0)

• w Numeric representation of the day of the week

So, date("now") displays 12 (n), 2012 (o) and 3 (w).

You're probably looking for :

• date("Y-m-d") for a date

• date("Y-m-d H:i:s") for a datetime

Answer 2

"now" is not a valid parameter for for this expectation, infact it should be strtotime function here, not date.

Date considers your now as

n

Numeric representation of a month, without leading zeros

o

ISO-8601 year number. This has the same value as Y, except that if the ISO week number (W) belongs to the previous or next year, that year is used instead. (added in PHP 5.1.0)

w

Numeric representation of the day of the week