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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.
Y= The year in 4 digits. (lower-case y gives the year's last 2 digits)
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||The English suffix for the day of the month||st, nd or th in the 1st, 2nd or 15th.|
|l||Full name (lowercase 'L')||Sunday – Saturday|
|D||Three letter name||Mon – Sun|
|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|
|Y||Numeric, 4 digits||Eg., 1999, 2003|
|y||Numeric, 2 digits||Eg., 99, 03|
|g||Hour, 12-hour, without leading zeros||1–12|
|h||Hour, 12-hour, with leading zeros||01–12|
|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 ...|
|r||RFC 2822||Thu, 21 Dec 2000 16:01:07 +0200|
Here are some examples of date format and result output.
F j, Y g:i a- November 6, 2010 12:50 am
F j, Y- November 6, 2010
F, Y- November, 2010
g:i a- 12:50 am
g:i:s a- 12:50:48 am
l, F jS, Y- Saturday, November 6th, 2010
M j, Y @ G:i- Nov 6, 2010 @ 0:50
Y/m/d \a\t g:i A- 2010/11/06 at 12:50 AM
Y/m/d \a\t g:ia- 2010/11/06 at 12:50am
Y/m/d g:i:s A- 2010/11/06 12:50:48 AM
the_time() template tag, the code below in the template file:
This entry was posted on <?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?> and is filed under <?php the_category(', ') ?>.
will be shown on your site as following:
This entry was posted on Friday, September 24th, 2004 and is filed under WordPress and WordPress Tips.
To localize dates, use the date_i18n() function.
You can probably safely localize these date format strings with the
_e(), etc. functions (demonstrated with