My PHP Advent article

My PHP Advent article just got published. It's a list of best practices around dealing with dates and times in PHP. Have a read and tell me what you think. Also, be sure to follow @phpadvent or subscribe.

Timezone database closed down

Interesting news today. The Olson database, which is used in countless operating systems and other software (including PHP) has been shut down due to a Copyright claim.

Details, which I won't repeat here can be found on Stephen Colbourne's blog.

PHP's DateTime object and unix times..

Just started checking out PHP 5.2's DateTime object. Its great to have a 'standard object' for dates.. Lots of the frameworks out there all define their own date class, perhaps this can help creating more generic interfaces.

Its quite hard to find the documentation though. I'm looking for a way to create a DateTime object based on a unix time, but this seems to be the only way:

  1. <?php
  2.  
  3. // unix time
  4. $unix = time();
  5.  
  6. $dateTime = new DateTime(date(DATE_ATOM,$unix));
  7.  
  8. ?>

Which is a pretty nasty hack, because the strtotime()-like parsing is unnecessary because the actual date is likely stored as a number anyway..

Update: kore pointed out the proper way to do this in the comments.

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My name is Evert, and I've been writing semi-regularly on this blog since 2006.

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