CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpfacebookfacebook-graph-apidatetime
Prajwol Onta
Prajwol Onta

Reputation: 1478

What is the time format used in facebook created date?

Hi i am working on facebook Graph API where i need all the posts information of a group. So I did it and saw [created_date'] => '2013-01-25T00:11:02+0000' what does this date and time represent i mean i know 2013-01-25 is date and 00:11:02 is time but what does T and +0000 represent.

BTW where is the server of facebook. Which timestamp should i use to match facebook time?

Thank you.

Upvotes: 13

Views: 34049

Answers (3)

BBagi
BBagi

Reputation: 2085

T = TIME and the +0000 is timezone offset. Facebook uses localized timezones. You can request a Unix timestamp instead of the string by adding the parameter: date_format=U to your graph API call.

Please see this link for more information.

Upvotes: 29

lc.
lc.

Reputation: 116468

This is a standard format, specifically ISO 8601.

As much as I don't like linking to it, http://www.w3schools.com/schema/schema_dtypes_date.asp does have a good "human-understandable" explanation:

The dateTime is specified in the following form "YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss" where:

YYYY indicates the year
MM indicates the month
DD indicates the day
T indicates the start of the required time section
hh indicates the hour
mm indicates the minute
ss indicates the second

To specify a time zone, you can either enter a dateTime in UTC time by adding a "Z" behind the time - like this:

2002-05-30T09:30:10Z

or you can specify an offset from the UTC time by adding a positive or negative time behind the time - like this:

2002-05-30T09:30:10-06:00

or

2002-05-30T09:30:10+06:00

Therefore, in your case the +0000 indicates a time offset of 0 from UTC.

Upvotes: 5

Ja͢ck
Ja͢ck

Reputation: 173562

The date format is called ISO 8601. The letter T is used to separate date and time unambiguously and +0000 is used to signify the timezone offset, in this case GMT or UTC.

That said, you generally don't need to worry so much about the actual contents; rather you should know how to work with them. To use such a date, you can use strtotime() to convert it into a time-stamp:

$ts = strtotime('2013-01-25T00:11:02+0000');

To convert the time-stamp back into a string representation, you can simply use gmdate() with the predefined date constant DATE_ISO8601:

echo gmdate(DATE_ISO8601, $ts);

Alternatively, using DateTime:

// import date
$d = DateTime::createFromFormat(DateTime::ISO8601, '2013-01-25T00:11:02+0000');

// export date
echo $dd->format(DateTime::ISO8601), PHP_EOL;

Upvotes: 13

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