Date and Time Formats in WordPress

WordPress has functions that get the date or time of a post, comment, or something else: the_date(), the_time(), mysql2date() etc. You can pass a format to each of these functions to get the time or date in the desired format. This post shows how to get desired format and which character in the specified format are responsible for what.

A simple example of displaying the time when the post was published:

<?php the_time('j F Y H:i'); ?>

Displays the date as: 25 March 2018 12:33.

All date and time format characters

Now, let's look at all the special characters that can be used in the format.

Examples

Example with WordPress function

Post was published at <?php the_time('j F Y H:i') ?> and was placed in categories <?php the_category(', ') ?>.

Displays:

Post was published at 25 March 2018 12:33 and was placed in categories WordPress, Codex.

Options related to dates

var_dump( [
	'date_format'     => get_option( 'date_format' ),
	'time_format'     => get_option( 'time_format' ),
	'gmt_offset'      => get_option( 'gmt_offset' ), // may be string - depends on value of `timezone_string`
	'offset'          => (float) get_option( 'gmt_offset' ) * HOUR_IN_SECONDS,
	'start_of_week'   => (int) get_option( 'start_of_week', 0 ),
	'timezone_string' => get_option( 'timezone_string' ),
] );

/*
array(6) {
  ["date_format"]=> string(5) "j M Y"
  ["time_format"]=> string(3) "H:i"
  ["gmt_offset"]=> float(5)
  ["offset"]=> float(18000)
  ["start_of_week"]=> int(1)
  ["timezone_string"]=> string(0) "Asia/Tashkent"
}
*/

Escaping

If you need to use characters from the table above as it is, without converting it to anything, you must prepend each symbol with backslash \:

echo get_the_time('j F Y - a format is \j \F \Y'); //> 25 March 2018 a format is j F Y

Localization

To translate strings of date like "November" to the language of the site, use date_i18n() function.

You can also use the standard localization functions to localize the format: __(), _e() etc. Example:

echo get_the_date( __('j F Y \t\i\m\e H:i','dom') );