A time in PHP, representing a date and a time, is an integer, not particularly readable. A time string, if I can coin a term, is a date and/or time in a human-readable format.
Here are some ways to get times and dates (courtesy of PHP.net's entry on strtotime):
<?php
echo strtotime("now"), "\n";
echo strtotime("10 September 2000"), "\n";
echo strtotime("+1 day"), "\n";
echo strtotime("+1 week"), "\n";
echo strtotime("+1 week 2 days 4 hours 2 seconds"), "\n";
echo strtotime("next Thursday"), "\n";
echo strtotime("last Monday"), "\n";
?>
Unfortunately (?), the output is a bunch of incomprehensible numbers. But
you can convert a time to a readable string thus:<?php
$now = strtotime ("January 1, 2013");
echo "<p>Right now it's:<br>";
echo date ("Y/m/d", $now), "<br>"; //Prints 2013/01/1
echo date ("m-d-y", $now), "<br>"; //01-01-13
echo date ("D M d, Y", $now), "<br>"; //Thu Jan 1, 2013
echo date ("D h:i:s a", $now), "<br>"; //Thu 12:00:00 am
?>
For more on formatting dates, see PHP.net's
entry on date.
To input a date in a form, see this code. You could adapt it also to work for times -- I did.