Playing with dates in magento

Introduction

Magento makes an usage of timezone which is configured from the backend (System > Configuration > General > Locale Options > Timezone) for formatting/displaying date/time.

$currentTimestamp = Mage::getModel('core/date')->timestamp(time()); //Magento's timestamp function makes a usage of timezone and converts it to timestamp

echo $date = date('Y-m-d', $currentTimestamp); //The value may differ than above because of the timezone settings.







Some Useful Examples

1. Displaying current date

1 2	$currentTimestamp = Mage::getModel('core/date')->timestamp(time()); echo $currentDate = date('Y-m-d', $currentTimestamp);

OR

1	echo $currentDate = Mage::getModel('core/date')->date('Y-m-d');

2. Formatting any date in any format

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$anyDate = '2011-12-11'; $dateTimestamp = Mage::getModel('core/date')->timestamp(strtotime($anyDate)); echo $currentDate = date('d.m.Y', $dateTimestamp);

OR

1 2	$anyDate = '2011-12-11'; echo $currentDate = Mage::getModel('core/date')->date('d.m.Y', strtotime($anyDate));

3. Predefined date formatting

1 2	$dateToFormat = '2011-12-11'; Mage::helper('core')->formatDate($dateToFormat, 'medium', false);

Note: Mage_Core_Helper_Data::format() has following arguments

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/**  * Format date using current locale options  *  * @param   date|Zend_Date|null $date in GMT timezone  * @param   string $format (full, long, medium, short)  * @param   bool $showTime  * @return  string  */ public function formatDate($date=null, $format='short', $showTime=false) { .... }