Codex

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.
  • S = The English suffix for the day of the month (e.g st, nd or th in the 1st, 2nd or 15th.)
  • 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 English ordinal suffix, use after j st, nd, rd or th
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
g Hour, 12-hour, without leading zeros 1–12
h Hour, 12-hour, with leading zeros 01–12
a Lowercase am, pm
A Uppercase AM, PM
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


Localization

To localize dates, use the date_i18n() function.

Event, Calendar, and Time Plugins