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"