Certain WordPress tag functions accept a parameter called a format string that allows you to determine how the date is going to be displayed. The format string is a template in which various parts of the date are combined to generate a date in the format specified.
For example, the format string:
l, F j, Y
creates a date that look like this:
Friday, September 24, 2004
Here is what each format character in the string above represents:
WordPress is written in the programming language PHP. The date formatting functions in WordPress use PHP’s built-in date formatting functions. You can use the table of date format characters on the PHP website as a reference for building date format strings for use in WordPress. Here is a table of some of the more useful items found there:
| Day of Month | ||
|---|---|---|
| d | Numeric, with leading zeros | 01–31 |
| j | Numeric, without leading zeros | 1–31 |
| S | The English suffix for the day of the month | st, nd or th in the 1st, 2nd or 15th. |
| Weekday | ||
| l | Full name (lowercase ‘L’) | Sunday – Saturday |
| D | Three letter name | Mon – Sun |
| Month | ||
| m | Numeric, with leading zeros | 01–12 |
| n | Numeric, without leading zeros | 1–12 |
| F | Textual full | January – December |
| M | Textual three letters | Jan – Dec |
| Year | ||
| Y | Numeric, 4 digits | Eg., 1999, 2003 |
| y | Numeric, 2 digits | Eg., 99, 03 |
| Time | ||
| a | Lowercase | am, pm |
| A | Uppercase | AM, PM |
| g | Hour, 12-hour, without leading zeros | 1–12 |
| h | Hour, 12-hour, with leading zeros | 01–12 |
| G | Hour, 24-hour, without leading zeros | 0-23 |
| H | Hour, 24-hour, with leading zeros | 00-23 |
| i | Minutes, with leading zeros | 00-59 |
| s | Seconds, with leading zeros | 00-59 |
| T | Timezone abbreviation | Eg., EST, MDT … |
| Full Date/Time | ||
| c | ISO 8601 | 2004-02-12T15:19:21+00:00 |
| r | RFC 2822 | Thu, 21 Dec 2000 16:01:07 +0200 |
| U | Unix timestamp (seconds since Unix Epoch) | 1455880176 |
Here are some examples of date format and result output.