How to Get the Current Date and Time in PHP

Topic: PHP / MySQLPrev|Next

Answer: Use the PHP date() Function

You can simply use the PHP date() function to get the current data and time in various format, for example, date('d-m-y h:i:s'), date('d/m/y H:i:s'), and so on.

Try out the following example to see how it basically works:

<?php
// Return current date from the remote server
$date = date('d-m-y h:i:s');
echo $date;
?>

The date and time returned by the above example is based on the server's default timezone setting. If you want to show date and time as per user's timezone, you can set the timezone manually using the date_default_timezone_set() function before the date() function call.

The following example shows the date and time in India timezone which is Asia/Kolkata.

<?php
// Set the new timezone
date_default_timezone_set('Asia/Kolkata');
$date = date('d-m-y h:i:s');
echo $date;
?>

To learn more about date and time handling, please check out the PHP date and time tutorial.

For a complete list of timezones supported by PHP, see timezone reference.

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