David and Katherine Goodwin

One of the relatively new features in PHP 5.2, is the DateTime class/functions. It has a few useful functions (date_parse, date_date_set, date_time_set etc) which make dealing with dates and times easier (date_parse provides some useful error info too).

Unfortunately, the PHP api still doesn't allow for something like :


$seconds = $dateTime->parse($string, $format);


Where $format would be something like : "d/m/y H:i:s".

Instead it sticks to the strtotime convention, which is a pain for those of us who don't live in the US and have customers who want to see dates in a dd/mm/yyyy format in input fields, but I digress.

One other good thing about DateTime is that it does at least allow you to store dates before 1970 or after 2038, which became useful recently with how we were/are using Propel.

Propel 1.2 stores dates within a model object as integer values, allowing you to specify a format to the date when calling the fields accessor method (e.g getDateCreated("d/m/Y")). Unfortunately it uses strtotime, which for some reason doesn't like dates before 1970 on the Linux platforms we use, and just returns NULL or FALSE.

So, on Friday, we ended up modifying our version of Creole and Propel to store DateTime objects internally instead of integers. I think Propel 1.3 uses the DateTime 'stuff' (as well as PDO), but as it's still in 'beta' and it's API has changed, I've not yet moved to use it.

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