Recipe 33: Understanding Date formats
Drupal dates are typically stored in one of two ways. Core Drupal dates—including Node: Created Time, and Node: Updated Time—are stored as Unix timestamps. Contributed module date fields can be stored as either a timestamp or a format known as ISO. Neither style is particularly friendly to human readers, so both field types are usually formatted before users see them. This recipe offers a tour of places in Drupal where dates can be formatted and information on how to customize the formats.
Tip
What's that Lucky Day?
The Unix timestamp 1234567890 fell on Friday the 13th, in February, 2009. This timestamp marks 1,234,567,890 seconds since January 1, 1970. The same date/time combination would be stored in a date field in ISO format as 2009-02-13T23:31:30+00:0. ISO is an abbreviation for the International Organization for Standardization.
Opening the browser windows side-by-side will help you understand date formatting. In the left window, open
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