Most of the time computers like to work in timestamps , but in many situations you need to convert a timestamps to a string representation of a date.
Common scenarios include displaying a date in a Web page, or passing a date to another application that expects to receive a date string in a specified format.
Here are the lists of the date – related formatting characters allowed in date()’s format string:
| Character | Description |
| J | This Character describes the day of the month without leading zeros. |
| D | This Character describes the 2 – digit day of the month, with a leading zero if appropriate. |
| D | This Character describes the day of the week as a three – letter string (such as “ Mon ” ). |
| l (lowercase ‘ L ’ ) | This Character describes the day of the week as a full word (such as “ Monday ” ). |
| W | This Character describes the day of the week as a number (0=Sunday, 6=Saturday). |
| N | This Character describes the day of the week as an ISO – 8601 number (1=Monday, 7=Sunday). |
| S | This Character describes an English ordinal suffix to append to the day of the month ( “ st, ” “ nd, ” “ rd, ” or “ th ” ). Often used with the j formatting character. |
| Z | This Character describes the day of the year (zero represents January 1). |
| W | This Character describes the 2 – digit ISO – 8601 week number in the year, with a leading zero if appropriate. Weeks start on Monday. The first week is week number 01. |
| M | This Character describes the month as a three – letter string (such as “ Jan ” ). |
| F | This Character describes the month as a full word (such as “ January ” ). |
| N | This Character describes the month as a number (1 – 12). |
| M | This Character describes the month as a two – digit number, with a leading zero if appropriate (01 – 12). |
| T | This Character describes the number of days in the month (28, 29, 30, or 31). |
| Y | This Character describes the year as a two – digit number. |
| Y | This Character describes the year as a four – digit number. |
| o (lowercase “ o ” ) | This Character describes the ISO – 8601 year number. This is usually the same value as Y; however if the ISO – 8601 week number belongs to the previous or the next year, that year is used instead. |
| L | This Character describes the “1” if the date is in a leap year, “0” otherwise. |
date() also allows the following time – formatting characters:
| Character | Description |
| G | This Character describes the hour in 12 – hour format, without leading zeros (1 – 12). |
| H | This Character describes the hour in 12 – hour format, with leading zeros (01 – 12). |
| G | This Character describes the hour in 24 – hour format, without leading zeros (0 – 23). |
| H | This Character describes the hour in 24 – hour format, with leading zeros (00 – 23). |
| I | This Character describes the Minutes, with leading zeros (00 – 59). |
| S | This Character describes the Seconds, with leading zeros (00 – 59). |
| U | This Character describes the Microseconds (will always be zero because, at the time of writing, date() can only accept an integer timestamp). |
| B | This Character describes the Swatch Internet Time — a time – zone – free, decimal time measure. |
| A | This Character describes the “ am ” or “ pm ”, depending on the value of the hour. |
| A | This Character describes the “ AM ” or “ PM ”, depending on the value of the hour. |
| E | This Character describes the full time zone identifier of the currently set time zone (such as “ UTC ” or “ America/Indiana/Indianapolis ” ). |
| T | This Character describes the time zone abbreviation for the currently set time zone (such as “ UTC ” or “ EST ” ). Abbreviations are best avoided because the same abbreviation is often used for multiple time zones throughout the world. |
| O (capital “ O ” ) | This Character describes the time zone offset from GMT, in the format hhmm . For example, the“ America/Indiana/Indianapolis ” time zone is 5 hours behind GMT, so its offset is – 0500 |
| P | This Character describes the Same as O , but with a colon between the hours and minutes (for example, – 05:00 ). |
| Z | This Character describes the time zone offset from GMT, in seconds. For example, the offset in seconds for the “ America/Indiana/Indianapolis ” time zone is – 18000 , because – 5 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds = – 18,000 seconds. |
| I (capital “ I ” ) | This Character describes the “1” if the currently set time zone is in daylight saving time;” 0 “otherwise. |
date() gives you three more formatting characters that return the date and time in one go:
| Character | Description |
| C | This Character describes the date and time as an ISO 8601 date. For example, 2014 – 03 – 28 T 19:42:00+11:00 represents March 28, 2014 at 7:42 in the evening, in a time zone that is 11 hours ahead of GMT. |
| R | This Character describes the date and time as an RFC 2822 date. For example, Tue, 28 Mar 2014 19:42:00 +1100 represents March 28, 2014 at 7:42 in the evening, in a time zone that is 11 hours ahead of GMT. RFC 2822 dates are commonly used in Internet protocols such as Web and email. |
| U | This Character describes the timestamp that was passed to date() , or the timestamp representing the current time if no timestamp was passed. |