How to Format a local time/date in PHP

string date ( string format [, int timestamp])

Returns a string formatted according to the given format string using the given integer timestamp or the current local time if no timestamp is given.

Note: The valid range of a timestamp is typically from Fri, 13 Dec 1901 20:45:54 GMT to Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 GMT. (These are the dates that correspond to the minimum and maximum values for a 32-bit signed integer.)

To generate a timestamp from a string representation of the date, you may be able to use strtotime(). Additionally, some databases have functions to convert their date formats into timestamps (such as MySQL's UNIX_TIMESTAMP function).

The following characters are recognized in the format string:

a - "am" or "pm"
A - "AM" or "PM"
B - Swatch Internet time
d - day of the month, 2 digits with leading zeros; i.e. "01" to "31"
D - day of the week, textual, 3 letters; i.e. "Fri"
F - month, textual, long; i.e. "January"
g - hour, 12-hour format without leading zeros; i.e. "1" to "12"
G - hour, 24-hour format without leading zeros; i.e. "0" to "23"
h - hour, 12-hour format; i.e. "01" to "12"
H - hour, 24-hour format; i.e. "00" to "23"
i - minutes; i.e. "00" to "59"
I (capital i) - "1" if Daylight Savings Time, "0" otherwise.
j - day of the month without leading zeros; i.e. "1" to "31"
l (lowercase 'L') - day of the week, textual, long; i.e. "Friday"
L - boolean for whether it is a leap year; i.e. "0" or "1"
m - month; i.e. "01" to "12"
M - month, textual, 3 letters; i.e. "Jan"
n - month without leading zeros; i.e. "1" to "12"
O - Difference to Greenwich time in hours; i.e. "+0200"
s - seconds; i.e. "00" to "59"
S - English ordinal suffix for the day of the month, 2 characters; i.e. "th", "nd"
t - number of days in the given month; i.e. "28" to "31"
T - Timezone setting of this machine; i.e. "MDT"
U - seconds since the epoch
w - day of the week, numeric, i.e. "0" (Sunday) to "6" (Saturday)
W - ISO-8601 week number of year, weeks starting on monday (added in PHP 4.1.0)
(Saturday)
Y - year, 4 digits; i.e. "1999"
y - year, 2 digits; i.e. "99"
z - day of the year; i.e. "0" to "365"
Z - timezone offset in seconds (i.e. "-43200" to "43200"). The offset for timezones west of UTC is always negative, and for those east of UTC is always positive.

Example

echo date ("l dS of F Y h:i:s A");