How can I get today's timestamp in PHP

Question

I tried

$dtToday = DateTime::createFromFormat('Y-m-d', date('Y-m-d'));

but when I output it

die($dtToday->format('d M Y g:i:s a'));

I still get the time eg "22 Jan 2011 4:53:59 pm". Why is that?

UPDATE

Ah... many people misunderstood me, my bad, I forgot to point out the main point. I created the date with just the date portion, I don't want the time. So I'd expect something like

22 Jan 2011 12:00:00 am

Answer 1

You can call ->setTime(0, 0) to zero out the time portion:

$date = DateTime::createFromFormat('Y-m-d', '2011-01-22')->setTime(0, 0);
echo $date->format('d M Y g:i:s a');
// 22 Jan 2011 12:00:00 am

Answer 2

See the documentation for DateTime::createFromFormat:

If format does not contain the character ! then portions of the generated time which are not specified in format will be set to the current system time.

If you do the following function call, you'll get the result you expect:

$dtToday = DateTime::createFromFormat('!Y-m-d', date('Y-m-d'));

Answer 3

Today's start timestamp

$todayStartTS = strtotime(date('Y-m-d', time()) . ' 00:00:00');