## 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", "07", "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"