Re: Re: Need for Date-object

At 14:32 2001-07-17 -0300, you wrote:

Hello, Erik Hjortsberg wrote: I always find it a hassle to use date and time data in my php applications. One have to convert and parse between mktime() and date() and have to keep track of different parameters and different formats. This is due to php absent handling of atomic dates, ie. objects. Treating them as strings is not very efficient code-wise. I don't quite agree. You can use the ISO-8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS) and you can do a lot of operations without converting to integers. For instance, you can use strcmp() to compare two dates and it will tell you if they are equal or which of them is older. Using integers has it downside because if you use some of available PHP functions you are limited to ranges between 1970 and 2038 on 32 bit OSes.

Well, what I meant was that you often have to deal with a lot of different date-formats such as timestamps, short-date, long-date, datetime, time only etc.. I never meant we should use integers or not, the internal representation in the class should be as flexible as it could be. The philosophy behind object-orienting is to provide a atomic representation of both code and data. When you have to write different functions for say adding a day to the date "2001-01-01" or the timestamp "995395533" your're not very efficient.

I've used some date-classes I've done myself, but it is clear that all would benefit from a standardized way of handling dates. And I think if would fit perfectly into what PEAR is about if we could provide a solid date-class. Now, I know that there's already a Date_Date class, but that consists solely of static functions and cannot be used to provide atomic date-objects. Furthermore, this is something that's already been tackled by all major object-capable languages. So there's no need to reinvent the wheel. So I ask all of you, given experiences from other languages, what interface and functions would you wan't to see in a common date-object? I don't know what you are looking for, but maybe you want to look into this class that eases the manipulation of dates in forms, by generated locale sensitive input fields for forms setting and retrieving date time values. http://phpclasses.UpperDesign.com/browse.html/package/230

Nah, not really what I meant. I meant a class with an internal representation of a date which is mappable to different external representations of that date. $date->toDateTime() $date->toTimestamp() $date->toShortDate() $date->toLongDate() etc. And if you wanted to compare a date entered by a user with a date in a database in the format of a timestamp you could do: $date1 = & Date::FromISO($entry); $date2 = & Date::FromTimestamp($timestamp); $res = $date1->compareTo($date2); if ($res === DATE_EQUAL) {

        echo "Equal!";

} elseif ($res === DATE_LESS) {

        echo "Less!";

} else {

        echo "More!";

} Or if the database stores it as a datetime: $date2 = & Date::FromDatetime($datetime); And if you want to display the value in the database (be it timestamp or datetime or anything else) you only have to do: $date2->asLongDate(); etc. Locales could be made through subclassing, ie. class SweDate extends Date { ... } $date1 = & Date::FromISO('2001-01-01 01:01:01'); $date2 = & SweDate::FromISO('2001-01-01 01:01:01'); echo $date1->asTextualDay(); echo $date2->asTextualDay(); would be: Monday Måndag Does anyone see the benefits? /erik hjortsberg