Playing Between Unix Time and Human Readable Time in Php

Unix time is widely used in unix-like operatin system to track down the total seconds. PHP provides some easy way to convert between Unix Time and Human Time, let’s first look at the date() function. date() formats a local time/date according to its parameter format.

{% blockquote Wikipedia %} Unix time (aka POSIX time or Epoch time), is a system for describing instants in time, defined as the number of seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), Thursday, 1 January 1970, not counting leap second. {% endblockquote %}

date( $format )

Refer to the manual for more time/date format.

###Human Readable Time to Unix Time

1. Let’s look at the mktime function.

// Set our timezone
date_default_timezone_set('UTC');
// The format
mktime( $hour, $minute, $second, $month, $day, $year);

You can get any format

echo mktime(5, 35, 0, 1, 1, 2000);	// 946704900

For instance, we have a string of time 010000 which indicates 1 hour. We can change this into second by using mktime() function like this:

$string = '010000';
mktime (substr($string, 0, 2), substr($string, 2, 2), substr($string, 4, 2), 1, 1, 1970);

Yes, because the Unix time start from 1st of Jan, 1970 so we can convert time into seconds like this way.

2. Using DateTime object and getTimestamp. Let’s us see what this DateTime can do. By using createFromFormat instance, we can convert a very complex time format into Unix Time.

//Example1
$date = DateTime::createFromFormat('m/d/y @ h:ia', '04/04/2014 @ 3.13pm')->getTimestamp();
    
//Example2
$date = DateTime::createFromFormat('YmdHis', '20130312000000')->getTimestamp();

3. Of course we cannot forget this handy strtotime. It can understand English.

echo strtotime("10 years ago"); 	// 1084971417
echo strtotime("next monday"); 		// 1401062400
echo strtotime("now");				// 1400504377

This is pretty straight forward comparing to other 2.

###Conclusion This is my way to convert complex human readable time to Unix time via PHP. However, it’s important to know that some of this function might fail at some point near the year 2038.

###Resource

• http://www.epochconverter.com/programming/functions-php.php
• http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.datetime.php