| a | Lowercase Ante meridiem and Post meridiem | am or pm |
| A | Uppercase Ante meridiem and Post meridiem | AM or PM |
| B | Swatch Internet time | 000 through 999 |
| c | ISO 8601 date (added in PHP 5) | 2004-02-12T15:19:21+00:00 |
| d | Day of the month, 2 digits with leading zeros | 01 to 31 |
| D | A textual representation of a day, three letters | Mon through Sun |
| F | A full textual representation of a month, such as January or March | January through December |
| g | 12-hour format of an hour without leading zeros | 1 through 12 |
| G | 24-hour format of an hour without leading zeros | 0 through 23 |
| h | 12-hour format of an hour with leading zeros | 01 through 12 |
| H | 24-hour format of an hour with leading zeros | 00 through 23 |
| i | Minutes with leading zeros | 00 to 59 |
| I | Whether or not the date is in daylights savings time | 1 if Daylight Savings Time, 0 otherwise. |
| j | Day of the month without leading zeros | 1 to 31 |
| l | A full textual representation of the day of the week | Sunday through Saturday |
| L | Whether it's a leap year | 1 if it is a leap year, 0 otherwise. |
| m | Numeric representation of a month, with leading zeros | 01 through 12 |
| M | A short textual representation of a month, three letters | Jan through Dec |
| n | Numeric representation of a month, without leading zeros | 1 through 12 |
| O | Difference to Greenwich time (GMT) in hours | Example: +0200 |
| r | RFC 2822 formatted date | Example: Thu, 21 Dec 2000 16:01:07 +0200 |
| s | Seconds, with leading zeros | 00 through 59 |
| S | English ordinal suffix for the day of the month, 2 characters | st, nd, rd or th. Works well with j |
| t | Number of days in the given month | 28 through 31 |
| T | Timezone setting of this machine | Examples: EST, MDT ... |
| U | Seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT) | number value |
| w | Numeric representation of the day of the week | 0 (for Sunday) through 6 (for Saturday) |
| W | ISO-8601 week number of year, weeks starting on Monday (added in PHP 4.1.0) | Example: 42 (the 42nd week in the year) |
| y | A two digit representation of a year | Examples: 1999 or 2003 |
| Y | A full numeric representation of a year, 4 digits | Examples: 99 or 03 |
| z | The day of the year (starting from 0) | 0 through 365 |
| Z | Timezone offset in seconds. The offset for timezones west of UTC is always negative, and for those east of UTC is always positive. | -43200 through 43200 |