calculate intervals & perform date arithmetic in PHP Here’s another one of those things that people find scary: date and time. Why don’t we demystify this topic as well. Let’s look at the traditional way of doing this first and then the Carbon way in the next couple of articles. We’ll also look at time addition and subtraction in the next article with the DateTime object. The easiest way to get into this is with examples. We’ll be tackling the following date and time functions: getdate() localtime() date() strtotime() mktime() checkdate() getdate() The getdate() function returns an array with the following values