Epoch Convert : Date Time Conversion in PHP

Epoch and Date Time Conversion in PHP

PHP is the most popular scripting language to develop web applications. PHP is a feature rich language which has date functions to handle date time. With PHP, we can easily handle date and time to implement in web applications. We can easily handle epoch or Unix timestamp to convert into human readable dates or can convert human readable dates to Unix timestamp.

Here we will explain few PHP Date/Time functions to get current epoch or Unix timestamp, convert timestamp to date and convert date to epoch or Unix timestamp.

Get current epoch or Unix timestamp in PHP

We can get the current epoch or timestamp using PHP time() function. The function returns the current epoch in the number of seconds.


			$epoch = time();

			echo($epoch);

Convert epoch or Unix timestamp to date in PHP

We can convert the epoch or timestamp to readable date format using PHP date() function. The function formats and return epoch or timestamp to human readable date and time.


			$epoch = time();

			echo(date("Y-m-d h:i:sa",$epoch));

we can also convert epoch or Unix timestamp to formatted date using PHP DateTime class.

 
			$timestamp = 1550962800;

			$datetime = new DateTime("@$timestamp");

			echo $datetime->format('d-m-Y H:i:s');

We can also display PHP date time from UTC time to specific timeozone.


			$timestamp = 1550962800;

			$datetime = new DateTime("@$timestamp");

			$datetimeFormat = $datetime->format('d-m-Y H:i:s');

			$timezoneFrom="UTC";

			$timezoneTo='Asia/Kolkata';

			$displayDate = new DateTime($datetimeFormat, new DateTimeZone($timezoneFrom));

			$displayDate->setTimezone(new DateTimeZone($timezoneTo));

			echo $displayDate->format('d-m-Y H:i:s');

Convert date to epoch or unix timestamp in PHP

We can convert human readable date to timestamp using PHP strtotime() function. The function convert English textual datetime into a Unix timestamp.


			$timestamp = strtotime("2019/02/24");

			echo $timestamp;

			$timestamp = strtotime("2019-02-24");

			echo $timestamp;

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