# Introduction

These functions allow you to get the date and time from the server where your PHP scripts are running. You can use these functions to format the date and time in many different ways.

The date and time information is internally stored as a 64-bit number so all conceivably useful dates (including negative years) are supported. The range is from about 292 billion years in the past to the same in the future.

> Note: Please keep in mind that these functions are dependent on the locale settings of your server. Make sure to take daylight saving time (use e.g. `$date = $date->modify('+7 days')` and not `$date += 7*24*60*60`) and leap years into consideration when working with these functions.

> Note: The timezones referenced in this section can be found in the List of Supported Timezones.