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

I like the solution posted by user1786647, and I've updated it a little to change the timezone to a function argument and add optional support for passing either a Unix time or datetime string to use for the returned datestamp.

It also includes a fallback for "setTimestamp" for users running version lower than PHP 5.3:

function DateStamp($strDateTime = null, $strTimeZone = "Europe/London") {
    $objTimeZone = new DateTimeZone($strTimeZone);

    $objDateTime = new DateTime();
    $objDateTime->setTimezone($objTimeZone);

    if (!empty($strDateTime)) {
        $fltUnixTime = (is_string($strDateTime)) ? strtotime($strDateTime) : $strDateTime;

        if (method_exists($objDateTime, "setTimestamp")) {
            $objDateTime->setTimestamp($fltUnixTime);
        }
        else {
            $arrDate = getdate($fltUnixTime);
            $objDateTime->setDate($arrDate['year'], $arrDate['mon'], $arrDate['mday']);
            $objDateTime->setTime($arrDate['hours'], $arrDate['minutes'], $arrDate['seconds']);
        }
    }
    return $objDateTime->format("Y-m-d H:i:s");
}