Getting date format m-d-Y H:i:s.u from milliseconds

Question

You can readily do this this with the input format U.u.

$now = DateTime::createFromFormat('U.u', microtime(true));
echo $now->format("m-d-Y H:i:s.u");

This produces the following output:

04-13-2015 05:56:22.082300

From the PHP manual page for date formats:

• U = Seconds since the Unix Epoch
• u = Microseconds

http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

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Thanks goes to giggsey for pointing out a flaw in my original answer, adding number_format() to the line should fix the case of the exact second. Too bad it doesn't feel quite as elegant any more...

$now = DateTime::createFromFormat('U.u', number_format(microtime(true), 6, '.', ''));

http://php.net/manual/en/function.number-format.php

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A note on time zones in response to DaVe.

Normally the createFromFormat() method will use the local time zone if one is not specified.

http://php.net/manual/en/datetime.createfromformat.php

However, the technique described here is initialising the DateTime object using microtime() which returns the number of seconds elapsed since the Unix Epoch (01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT).

http://php.net/manual/en/function.microtime.php

This means that the DateTime object is implicitly initialised to UTC, which is fine for server internal tasks that just want to track elapsed time.

If you need to display the time for a particular time zone then you need to set it accordingly. However, this should be done as a separate step after the initialisation (not using the third parameter of createFromFormat()) because of the reasons discussed above.

The setTimeZone() method can be used to accomplish this requirement.

http://php.net/manual/en/datetime.settimezone.php

As an example:

$now = DateTime::createFromFormat('U.u', number_format(microtime(true), 6, '.', ''));
echo $now->format("m-d-Y H:i:s.u") . '<br>';

$local = $now->setTimeZone(new DateTimeZone('Australia/Canberra'));
echo $local->format("m-d-Y H:i:s.u") . '<br>';

Produces the following output:

10-29-2015 00:40:09.433818
10-29-2015 11:40:09.433818

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Note that if you want to input into mysql, the time format needs to be:

format("Y-m-d H:i:s.u")

php.net says:

Microseconds (added in PHP 5.2.2). Note that date() will always generate 000000 since it takes an integer parameter, whereas DateTime::format() does support microseconds if DateTime was created with microseconds.

So use as simple:

$micro_date = microtime();
$date_array = explode(" ",$micro_date);
$date = date("Y-m-d H:i:s",$date_array[1]);
echo "Date: $date:" . $date_array[0]."<br>";

Recommended and use dateTime() class from referenced:

$t = microtime(true);
$micro = sprintf("%06d",($t - floor($t)) * 1000000);
$d = new DateTime( date('Y-m-d H:i:s.'.$micro, $t) );

print $d->format("Y-m-d H:i:s.u"); // note at point on "u"

Note u is microseconds (1 seconds = 1000000 µs).

Another example from php.net:

$d2=new DateTime("2012-07-08 11:14:15.889342");

Reference of dateTime() on php.net

I've answered on question as short and simplify to author. Please see for more information to author: getting date format m-d-Y H:i:s.u from milliseconds

Here's a slightly shorter approach. Rather than work to create a high-precision numeric date/time, I convert the microsecond value to a string, remove the 0, and add it to the end of the date/time string. I can easily trim the number of decimals by adjusting the string length parameter; here I use 4 to get milliseconds, but you could use 7 to get microseconds.

$t = explode(" ",microtime());
echo date("m-d-y H:i:s",$t[1]).substr((string)$t[0],1,4);

For a microtime() value of 0.98236000 1407400573, this returns 08-07-14 01:08:13.982.

I'm use

echo date("Y-m-d H:i:s.").gettimeofday()["usec"];

output: 2017-09-05 17:04:57.555036

# PHP 8 type safe when using declare(strict_types=1);
echo date('m-d-Y H:i:s').substr((string) fmod(microtime(true), 1), 1, 4);

example output:

02-06-2019 16:45:03.53811192512512

If you have a need to limit the number of decimal places then the below line (credit mgutt) would be a good alternative. (With the code below, the 6 limits the number of decimal places to 6.)

echo date('m-d-Y H:i:').sprintf('%09.6f', date('s')+fmod(microtime(true), 1));

example output:

02-11-2019 15:33:03.624493

For PHP 8.0+

The bug has been recently fixed and now you can use UNIX timestamps with a fractional part.

$milliseconds = 1375010774123;

$d = new DateTime( '@'. $milliseconds/1000 );
print $d->format("m-d-Y H:i:s.u");

Output:

07-28-2013 11:26:14.123000

For PHP < 8.0

You need to specify the format of your UNIX timestamp before you can use it in the DateTime object. As noted in other answers, you can simply work around this bug by using createFromFormat() and number_format()

$milliseconds = 1375010774123;

$d = DateTime::createFromFormat('U.v', number_format($milliseconds/1000, 3, '.', ''));
print $d->format("m-d-Y H:i:s.u");

Output:

07-28-2013 11:26:14.123000

For PHP < 7.3

If you are still using PHP older than 7.3 you can replace U.v with U.u. It will not make any difference, but the millisecond format identifier is present only since PHP 7.3.

$milliseconds = 1375010774123;
//                                 V - Use microseconds instead of milliseconds
$d = DateTime::createFromFormat('U.u', number_format($milliseconds/1000, 3, '.', ''));
print $d->format("m-d-Y H:i:s.u");

Output:

07-28-2013 11:26:14.123000

If you want to format a date like JavaScript's (new Date()).toISOString() for some reason, this is how you can do it in PHP:

$now = microtime(true);
gmdate('Y-m-d\TH:i:s', $now).sprintf('.%03dZ',round(($now-floor($now))*1000));

Sample output:

2016-04-27T18:25:56.696Z

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Just to prove that subtracting off the whole number doesn't reduce the accuracy of the decimal portion:

>>> number_format(123.01234567890123456789,25)
=> "123.0123456789012408307826263"
>>> number_format(123.01234567890123456789-123,25)
=> "0.0123456789012408307826263"

PHP did round the decimal places, but it rounded them the same way in both cases.