RE: [PHP-DEV] question about backward-compatibility break/bug in php 5.2.6

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008, Jack Steadman wrote: > Thank you for taking the time to explain this to me. A couple more > points below: > > > strtotime() has always accepted month and day numbers 0 in order to > > express "last month of the previos year" and "last day of the previous > > month". Take: > > So my biggest issue with this is that it's exception-case behavior, > treating truly invalid dates as valid dates for no obvious reason. Who > needs this functionality? Why is it even a good idea? It's nice to find the last day of next month. > A close second is that this behavior is completely undocumented. > http://us.php.net/strtotime states that the time argument to > strtotime > is "The string to parse, according to the GNU > Date Input Formats > syntax" and that false is returned on failure. GNU date formats do NOT > allow for zero months and days (see > > http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/Calendar-date-items.htm > l#SEC116). No official mention is made of the exception case that you > describe. The closest the docs come is a user comment on the strtotime > page from June 19 of this year (perhaps someone who upgraded to 5.2.6 > and found this behavior for the first time?) warning other users that > 2008-00-14 is interpreted as 2007-12-14. Yes, the documentation is broken. I'm working on fixing that. > This is not actually the case. Take one of our machines (first part of > php -i included here): <snip> > This 64-bit machine is running 5.2.5 and returns false on the all-zero > datetime string. It was upgraded last week to 5.2.6 and started > returning the large negative integer. <snip> > *Something* changed in date handling between 5.2.5 and 5.2.6. Whether > you perpetuate the exception case or not, it *is* a regression. Yes, because there was a regression in 5.2.[45]: php-5.2.6$ sapi/cli/php -n -r 'var_dump( strtotime( "0000-00-00 00:00" ) );' int(-62169987600) php-5.2.5$ sapi/cli/php -n -r 'var_dump( strtotime( "0000-00-00 00:00" ) );' bool(false) php-5.2.4$ sapi/cli/php -n -r 'var_dump( strtotime( "0000-00-00 00:00" ) );' bool(false) even in PHP 5.1 it doesn't return false (although it's incorrect): $ php-5.1dev -n -r 'var_dump( strtotime( "0000-00-00 00:00" ) );' int(943916400) and *even* on 4.3.9: $ php-4.3.9 -n -r 'var_dump( strtotime( "0000-00-00 00:00" ) );' int(943916400) regards, Derick -- HEAD before 5_3!: http://tinyurl.com/6d2esb http://derickrethans.nl | http://ezcomponents.org | http://xdebug.org