PHP | RFC 3339 date format in RSS Feeds

RSS Feeds use RFC 3339 date format in their XML/Atom feeds.

Date formats have often caused confusion in the development, interoperability and maintenance of software applications. To improve the consistency in use of Date and Time, RFC 3339 came into existence which uses Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

For PHP versions < 5.2,


$dateRFC = "2008-12-01T13:30:00.000-04:00";
$myDate = date('d.m.Y', strtotime($dateRFC)); // 01.12.2008


For PHP versions >= 5.2,


$dateRFC = "2008-12-01T13:30:00.000-04:00";
$myDate = new DateTime($dateRFC);
$dateStr = date('d.m.Y', strtotime($dateRFC)); // 01.12.2008


Read: IETF: RFC 3339