How to display a date as iso 8601 format with PHP

Question

I\'m trying to display a datetime from my MySQL database as an iso 8601 formated string with PHP but it\'s coming out wrong.

17 Oct 2008 is coming out as: 1969-12-31

Answer 1

Procedural style :

echo date_format(date_create('17 Oct 2008'), 'c');
// Output : 2008-10-17T00:00:00+02:00

Object oriented style :

$formatteddate = new DateTime('17 Oct 2008');
echo $datetime->format('c');
// Output : 2008-10-17T00:00:00+02:00

Hybrid 1 :

echo date_format(new DateTime('17 Oct 2008'), 'c');
// Output : 2008-10-17T00:00:00+02:00

Hybrid 2 :

echo date_create('17 Oct 2008')->format('c');
// Output : 2008-10-17T00:00:00+02:00

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Notes :

1) You could also use 'Y-m-d\TH:i:sP' as an alternative to 'c' for your format.

2) The default time zone of your input is the time zone of your server. If you want the input to be for a different time zone, you need to set your time zone explicitly. This will also impact your output, however :

echo date_format(date_create('17 Oct 2008 +0800'), 'c');
// Output : 2008-10-17T00:00:00+08:00

3) If you want the output to be for a time zone different from that of your input, you can set your time zone explicitly :

echo date_format(date_create('17 Oct 2008')->setTimezone(new DateTimeZone('America/New_York')), 'c');
// Output : 2008-10-16T18:00:00-04:00