Formatting Date and Time

From: http://codex.wordpress.org/Formatting_Date_and_Time

Customizing the Time and Date

Certain WordPress tag functions are used to display or return date and time information; the_date() and the_time() are examples of this. Some of these functions accept a parameter called a format string that allows you to determine how the date is going to be displayed. The format string is a template in which various parts of the date are combined (using "format characters") to generate a date in the format specified.

For example, the format string:

l, F j, Y

creates a date that look like this:

Friday, September 24, 2004

Here is what each format character in the string above represents:

• l = Full name for day of the week (lower-case L).
• F = Full name for the month.
• j = The day of the month.
• Y = The year in 4 digits. (lower-case y gives the year's last 2 digits)

(Commas are read literally.)

WordPress is written in the programming language PHP. The date formatting functions in WordPress use PHP's built-in date formatting functions. You can use the table of date format characters on the PHP website as a reference for building date format strings for use in WordPress. Here is a table of some of the more useful items found there:

Day of Month
d	Numeric, with leading zeros	01–31
j	Numeric, without leading zeros	1–31
S	The English suffix for the day of the month	st, nd or th in the 1st, 2nd or 15th.
Weekday
l	Full name  (lowercase 'L')	Sunday – Saturday
D	Three letter name	Mon – Sun
Month
m	Numeric, with leading zeros	01–12
n	Numeric, without leading zeros	1–12
F	Textual full	January – December
M	Textual three letters	Jan - Dec
Year
Y	Numeric, 4 digits	Eg., 1999, 2003
y	Numeric, 2 digits	Eg., 99, 03
Time
a	Lowercase	am, pm
A	Uppercase	AM, PM
g	Hour, 12-hour, without leading zeros	1–12
h	Hour, 12-hour, with leading zeros	01–12
G	Hour, 24-hour, without leading zeros	0-23
H	Hour, 24-hour, with leading zeros	00-23
i	Minutes, with leading zeros	00-59
s	Seconds, with leading zeros	00-59
T	Timezone abbreviation	Eg., EST, MDT ...
Full Date/Time
c	ISO 8601	2004-02-12T15:19:21+00:00
r	RFC 2822	Thu, 21 Dec 2000 16:01:07 +0200

Examples

Here are some examples of date format and result output.

• F j, Y g:i a - November 6, 2010 12:50 am
• F j, Y - November 6, 2010
• F, Y - November, 2010
• g:i a - 12:50 am
• g:i:s a - 12:50:48 am
• l, F jS, Y - Saturday, November 6th, 2010
• M j, Y @ G:i - Nov 6, 2010 @ 0:50
• Y/m/d \a\t g:i A - 2010/11/06 at 12:50 AM
• Y/m/d \a\t g:ia - 2010/11/06 at 12:50am
• Y/m/d g:i:s A - 2010/11/06 12:50:48 AM
• Y/m/d - 2010/11/06

Combined with the_time() template tag, the code below in the template file:

This entry was posted on <?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?> and is filed under <?php the_category(', ') ?>.

will be shown on your site as following:

This entry was posted on Friday, September 24th, 2004 and is filed under WordPress and WordPress Tips.

Localization

To localize dates, use the date_i18n() function.

You can probably safely localize these date format strings with the __(), _e(), etc. functions (demonstrated with get_the_date(__(…))):