How Do I Use PHP to Get the Current Year

As a web developer, you may often find the need to include the current year in your website or application.

Whether it be for copyright information, dynamic content or just to keep your site up-to-date, having the ability to easily retrieve the current year can be useful.

In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at how you can use PHP to get the current year and display it in your web page.


The Date Function

The date function in PHP is used to format the current date and time according to a specified format.

To get the current year, we simply need to call the function and format the output to display only the year.

<?php
    $currentYear = date("Y");
    echo $currentYear;
?>

In the example above, the date function is called with the format specifier Y, which returns the year with century as a decimal number.

Using a Variable

If you need to use the current year in multiple places in your code, it may be more efficient to store the value in a variable.

<?php
    $currentYear = date("Y");
    echo $currentYear;
?>

In this example, the value of the current year is stored in the variable $currentYear.

You can then use this variable wherever you need to display the current year in your code.


Conclusion

Getting the current year in PHP is a simple task that can be accomplished using the date function.

Whether you want to display it in a specific format or store it in a variable for later use, the date function provides a convenient way to retrieve the current year.

We hope this tutorial has been helpful in showing you how to get the current year in PHP.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them below.