How to Get the Day of the Week in PHP?

Using the following PHP date formats, you can get today's day relative to a week:

Character	Description
D	A three-letter textual representation of a day (Mon through Sun).
l	A full textual representation of the day of the week (Sunday through Saturday).
N	ISO-8601 numeric representation of the day of the week (where 1 denotes Monday and 7 denotes Sunday).
w	Numeric representation of the day of the week (where 0 denotes Sunday and 6 denotes Saturday).

For example:

$dt = new DateTime();

echo $dt->format('D'); // output: 'Mon' - 'Sun'
echo $dt->format('l'); // output: 'Monday' - 'Sunday'
echo $dt->format('N'); // output: 1 - 7
echo $dt->format('w'); // output: 0 - 6

Or, alternatively, you can achieve the same using the date() function, like so:

echo date('D'); // output: 'Mon' - 'Sun'
echo date('l'); // output: 'Monday' - 'Sunday'
echo date('N'); // output: 1 - 7
echo date('w'); // output: 0 - 6

To include the timezone, you could do the following:

$tz = new DateTimeZone('Europe/Berlin');
$dt = new DateTime('now', $tz);

echo $dt->format('D'); // output: 'Mon' - 'Sun'
echo $dt->format('l'); // output: 'Monday' - 'Sunday'
echo $dt->format('N'); // output: 1 - 7
echo $dt->format('w'); // output: 0 - 6

You can achieve the same with the date() function by setting the timezone using date_default_timezone_set(). However, this isn't the ideal solution as it would set the default timezone globally (i.e. it will be used by all date/time functions). To avoid that, you should use the DateTime object instead (as shown above).