How to get an humanly readable string representation of the current date + time in PHP?

Question

It doesn't really matter how exactly it looks like. I try to make an error log class that needs to print some useful stuff into the error notification. A unix timestamp would not be too obvious for the poor admin who's got to fix the bugs ;)

Answer 1

Take a look at the date function

//assuming time() is exactly March 10, 2001, 5:16 pm

date("F j, Y, g:i a");
//prints March 10, 2001, 5:16 pm

date("d/m/y, H:i:s");
//prints 10/03/01 17:16:00

Answer 2

From the docs:

<?php
// set the default timezone to use. Available since PHP 5.1
date_default_timezone_set('UTC');


// Prints something like: Monday
echo date("l");

// Prints something like: Monday 8th of August 2005 03:12:46 PM
echo date('l jS \of F Y h:i:s A');

// Prints: July 1, 2000 is on a Saturday
echo "July 1, 2000 is on a " . date("l", mktime(0, 0, 0, 7, 1, 2000));

/* use the constants in the format parameter */
// prints something like: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 15:12:46 UTC
echo date(DATE_RFC822);

// prints something like: 2000-07-01T00:00:00+00:00
echo date(DATE_ATOM, mktime(0, 0, 0, 7, 1, 2000));
?>