NOW() function in PHP

Question

Is there a PHP function that returns the date and time in the same format as the MySQL function NOW()?

I know how to do it using date(), b

Answer 1

One more answer I find easy to use:

echo date('c');

// 2015-07-27T00:00:00+02:00

This is ISO 8601 date (added in PHP 5) which MySQL uses

Edit

MySQL 5.7 do not allow timezone in the datetime by default. You can disable the error with SQL_MODE=ALLOW_INVALID_DATES. See the answer here for more details: https://stackoverflow.com/a/35944059/2103434. But that also means that the timezone will be lost when saving to the database!

By default MySQL uses the system's timezone, and as long as PHP uses the same timezone you should be okay. In my case CET / UTC+2.

That means that if I insert 2015-07-27T00:00:00+02:00 to the database, only 2015-07-27T00:00:00 will be stored (but that is the correct local time!).

When I load the time back in to PHP,

$importedDate = new \DateTime('2015-07-27T00:00:00')

it will automatically assume it's +02:00 timezone since it's the default. Printing this will be correct again:

echo $importedDate->format('c');
// 2015-07-27T00:00:00+02:00

To be safe, always use UTC on the server, specify it in MySQL and PHP, and then only convert it to your user's locale when displaying the date:

date_default_timezone_set('UTC');
$importedDate = new \DateTime('2015-07-27T00:00:00+02:00');
echo $importedDate->format('c');
// 2015-07-27T00:00:00+02:00

$importedDate->setTimezone(new \DateTimeZone("America/New_York"));
echo $importedDate->format('c');
// 2015-07-26T18:00:00-04:00