This course will be retired on June 1, 2025.
Heads up! To view this whole video, sign in with your Courses account or enroll in your free 7-day trial. Sign In Enroll
Preview
Start a free Courses trial
to watch this video
Dates and times in PHP used to be quite a mess in the PHP 4 days, but the DateTime class has brought much easier workflows.
Related Discussions
Have questions about this video? Start a discussion with the community and Treehouse staff.
Sign upRelated Discussions
Have questions about this video? Start a discussion with the community and Treehouse staff.
Sign up
PHP has a code class called Date Time.
0:00
This will help you in reading, writing,
comparing dates, or
0:02
making date time related calculations.
0:05
There are many date and
0:07
time related functions in PHP besides the
date time class, but
0:08
this provides a nice object oriented
interface to most of the common uses.
0:12
So let’s start off by opening index dot
PHP.
0:16
On line three, we’re going to create a new
date time object and
0:18
store it in the date variable.
0:21
In this case,
0:23
we'll be creating a object by passing a
string into the class constructor.
0:24
This string will contain a date, which can
be in one of a bunch of different formats.
0:28
We'll look at some of these formats
shortly, but for
0:32
now, this example has an input format of
year, comma, August 23.
0:33
On line seven we're outputting a paragraph
of the text.
0:38
The output day is, then using the format
method on
0:41
our date time object output the date in
our own specific format.
0:44
Our example here use M slash D slash
capital Y is an output format.
0:48
Meaning when we run this script we should
expect to see 08/23/2014.
0:53
Let's take a look in preview mode, by
clicking on the eye icon.
0:59
Cool, that works.
1:01
Here we have the output date is
08/23/2014, just like we expected.
1:07
The benefit here is that we can change the
input date string, and
1:10
have the same output format.
1:13
One alternative commonly used input
format, is the SQL date string.
1:15
Let's go back to the work space.
1:19
Back to index.php and let's enter a new
date and a new format.
1:21
So I'm gonna keep the year 2014.
1:27
I'm gonna change things around a little
bit and enter 09-12.
1:29
Which is the 12th of September.
1:33
I save that out.
1:37
Then refresh.
1:39
Great, we have the exact same date format,
but it has a different date.
1:40
If we go out back to the workspace, we can
get a little bit more adventurous with
1:46
initializing date time objects using
string offsets.
1:49
We can change the constructor to take a
string starting with a plus or a minus.
1:52
Then we add number of units and
1:57
define the unit with the words second,
hours, days, weeks, months, or even years.
1:58
So if we enter plus two weeks and have a
little look, see what happens there.
2:04
Then we will have an output which is two
weeks from now.
2:13
Brilliant.
2:17
You can jump forwards using more
human-friendly phrases, too.
2:21
We can change this string to contain
phrases like next week or tomorrow.
2:24
So let's have a go at that.
2:28
Next week.
2:30
Perfect.
2:33
Tomorrow.
2:35
There we go.
2:40
As I mentioned earlier the string argument
passed to the date time constructor on
2:42
line three can accept dates in many
different input formats.
2:45
To learn more about the date time formats
we can use the PHP manual.
2:48
There is a link in the notes for
2:52
this video called PHP date formats so
let's head over there.
2:53
[SOUND] You scroll about half way down.
2:56
You can see under localized notations
there's a whole bunch of
3:01
different formats supported.
3:05
Some American ones.
3:07
Some more generic.
3:08
The format here.
3:10
This is a literal string.
3:12
So that means it's actually a slash, and
not some special meaning.
3:13
And then you can see some actual examples
of how they look.
3:16
So, when you use them they'll come out
without the quotation marks around them.
3:19
And there's some other fairly common
formats here.
3:24
This one, like the four digit year, month,
and
3:27
day with slashes could be one that you
might want to use.
3:29
Sometimes you will need to work with dates
that are stored in unsupported formats,
3:32
for example if a string contains two date
segments with numeric values below 13 they
3:36
could both be days or months.
3:41
Luckily the date time class has a method
called create from format we can
3:43
provide our custom input format to this
method along with our date so
3:47
that PHP can read the string correctly.
3:50
If we go back to our workspace, paste this
code in.
3:52
On line three here we have a string
containing an unsupported date format.
3:57
We store it in the raw variable and pass
it to the create from format method.
4:01
If all goes well,
4:05
when we run this once again, we should see
our date output in the same format.
4:06
This time the date should be 11/10/1968.
4:10
Save that and see if it works.
4:16
Perfect!
4:20
Let's move on.
4:20
You need to sign up for Treehouse in order to download course files.
Sign upYou need to sign up for Treehouse in order to set up Workspace
Sign up