PHP DateTime microseconds always returns 0

Question

this code always returns 0 in PHP 5.2.5 for microseconds:

format(\"Y-m-d\\TH:i:s.u\") . \"\\n\";
?>


        

Answer 1

How about this?

$micro_date = microtime();
$date_array = explode(" ",$micro_date);
$date = date("Y-m-d H:i:s",$date_array[1]);
echo "Date: $date:" . $date_array[0]."<br>";

Sample Output

2013-07-17 08:23:37:0.88862400

Answer 2

Building on Lucky’s comment, I wrote a simple way to store messages on the server. In the past I’ve used hashes and increments to get unique file names, but the date with micro-seconds works well for this application.

// Create a unique message ID using the time and microseconds
    list($usec, $sec) = explode(" ", microtime());
    $messageID = date("Y-m-d H:i:s ", $sec) . substr($usec, 2, 8);
    $fname = "./Messages/$messageID";

    $fp = fopen($fname, 'w');

This is the name of the output file:

2015-05-07 12:03:17 65468400

Answer 3

This seems to work, although it seems illogical that http://us.php.net/date documents the microsecond specifier yet doesn't really support it:

function getTimestamp()
{
        return date("Y-m-d\TH:i:s") . substr((string)microtime(), 1, 8);
}

Answer 4

Working from Lucky's comment and this feature request in the PHP bug database, I use something like this:

class ExtendedDateTime extends DateTime {
    /**
     * Returns new DateTime object.  Adds microtime for "now" dates
     * @param string $sTime
     * @param DateTimeZone $oTimeZone 
     */
    public function __construct($sTime = 'now', DateTimeZone $oTimeZone = NULL) {
        // check that constructor is called as current date/time
        if (strtotime($sTime) == time()) {
            $aMicrotime = explode(' ', microtime());
            $sTime = date('Y-m-d H:i:s.' . $aMicrotime[0] * 1000000, $aMicrotime[1]);
        }

        // DateTime throws an Exception with a null TimeZone
        if ($oTimeZone instanceof DateTimeZone) {
            parent::__construct($sTime, $oTimeZone);
        } else {
            parent::__construct($sTime);
        }
    }
}

$oDate = new ExtendedDateTime();
echo $oDate->format('Y-m-d G:i:s.u');

Output:

2010-12-01 18:12:10.146625

Answer 5

This method is safer than the accepted answer:

date('Y-m-d H:i:s.') . str_pad(substr((float)microtime(), 2), 6, '0', STR_PAD_LEFT)

Output:

2012-06-01 12:00:13.036613

Update: Not recommended (see comments)

Answer 6

You can specify that your input contains microseconds when constructing a DateTime object, and use microtime(true) directly as the input.

Unfortunately, this will fail if you hit an exact second, because there will be no . in the microtime output; so use sprintf to force it to contain a .0 in that case:

date_create_from_format(
    'U.u', sprintf('%.f', microtime(true))
)->format('Y-m-d\TH:i:s.uO');

Or equivalently (more OO-style)

DateTime::createFromFormat(
    'U.u', sprintf('%.f', microtime(true))
)->format('Y-m-d\TH:i:s.uO');