[php] Getting a timestamp for today at midnight?

How would I go about getting a timestamp in php for today at midnight. Say it's monday 5PM and I want the Timestamp for Monday(today) at midnight(12 am) which already has happened.

Thank you

I think that you should use the new PHP DateTime object as it has no issues doing dates beyond the 32 bit restrictions that strtotime() has. Here's an example of how you would get today's date at midnight.

$today = new DateTime();
$today->setTime(0,0);

Or if you're using PHP 5.4 or later you can do it this way:

$today = (new DateTime())->setTime(0,0);

Then you can use the echo $today->format('Y-m-d'); to get the format you want your object output as.

PHP DateTime Object

Today at midnight. Easy.

$stamp = mktime(0, 0, 0);

You are looking to calculate the time of the most recent celestial event where the sun has passed directly below your feet, adjusted for local conventions of marking high noon and also potentially adjusting so that people have enough daylight left after returning home from work, and for other political considerations.

Daunting right? Actually this is a common problem but the complete answer is location-dependent:

$zone = new \DateTimeZone('America/New_York'); // Or your own definition of “here”
$todayStart = new \DateTime('today midnight', $zone);
$timestamp = $todayStart->getTimestamp();

Potential definitions of “here” are listed at https://secure.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php

$today_at_midnight = strtotime(date("Ymd"));

should give you what you're after.

explanation

What I did was use PHP's date function to get today's date without any references to time, and then pass it to the 'string to time' function which converts a date and time to a epoch timestamp. If it doesn't get a time, it assumes the first second of that day.

References: Date Function: http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

String To Time: http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php

Updated Answer in 19 April, 2020

Simply we can do this:

$today = date('Y-m-d 00:00:00');

In more object way:

$today = new \DateTimeImmutable('today');

example:

 echo (new \DateTimeImmutable('today'))->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');
// will output: 2019-05-16 00:00:00

and:

echo (new \DateTimeImmutable())->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');
echo (new \DateTimeImmutable('now'))->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');
// will output: 2019-05-16 14:00:35

$timestamp = strtotime('today midnight');

is the same as

$timestamp = strtotime('today');

and it's a little less work on your server.

If you are using Carbon you can do the following. You could also format this date to set an Expire HTTP Header.

Carbon::parse('tomorrow midnight')->format(Carbon::RFC7231_FORMAT)

$midnight = strtotime('midnight'); is valid
You can also try out strtotime('12am') or strtotime('[input any time you wish to here. e.g noon, 6pm, 3pm, 8pm, etc]'). I skipped adding today before midnight because the default is today.