Supported Date and Time Formats
PHP Manual

Time Formats

This page describes the different time formats that the strtotime, DateTime and date_create parser understands.

Used Symbols
Description Formats Examples
frac . [0-9]+ ".21342", ".85"
hh "0"?[1-9] | "1"[0-2] "04", "7", "12"
HH [01][0-9] | "2"[0-4] "04", "7", "19"
meridian [AaPp] .? [Mm] .? [\0\t ] "A.m.", "pM", "am."
MM [0-5][0-9] "00", "12", "59"
II [0-5][0-9] "00", "12", "59"
space [ \t]  
tz "("? [A-Za-z]{1,6} ")"? | [A-Z][a-z]+([_/][A-Z][a-z]+)+ "CEST", "Europe/Amsterdam", "America/Indiana/Knox"
tzcorrection "GMT"? [+-] hh ":"? MM? "+0400", "GMT-07:00", "-07:00"
12 Hour Notation
Description Format Examples
Hour only, with meridian hh space? meridian "4 am", "5PM"
Hour and minutes, with meridian hh [.:] MM space? meridian "4:08 am", "7:19P.M."
Hour, minutes and seconds, with meridian hh [.:] MM [.:] II space? meridian "4:08:37 am", "7:19:19P.M."
MS SQL (Hour, minutes, seconds and fraction with meridian), PHP 5.3 and later only hh ":" MM ":" II [.:] [0-9]+ meridian "4:08:39:12313am"
24 Hour Notation
Description Format Examples
Hour and minutes 't'? HH [.:] MM "04:08", "19.19", "T23:43"
Hour and minutes, no colon 't'? HH MM "0408", "t1919", "T2343"
Hour, minutes and seconds 't'? HH [.:] MM [.:] II "04.08.37", "t19:19:19"
Hour, minutes and seconds, no colon 't'? HH MM II "040837", "T191919"
Hour, minutes, seconds and timezone 't'? HH [.:] MM [.:] II space? ( tzcorrection | tz ) "040837CEST", "T191919-0700"
Hour, minutes, seconds and fraction 't'? HH [.:] MM [.:] II frac "04.08.37.81412", "19:19:19.532453"
Time zone information tz | tzcorrection "CEST", "Europe/Amsterdam", "+0430", "GMT-06:00"