Five Minutes

I’ve had a couple of whinges on IRC lately about why I’m not thrilled with having user notes in their current form in the PHP manual; we get entirely too many questions in ##php from people who’ve copied code out of a note and are then annoyed when it turns out the code is wrong, broken, horrible, or all of the above.

I present this example from the DateTime::getTimestamp() manual page. It’ll be disappearing from the mirrors over the next few hours, because I’ve deleted it (and posted a much simpler note in its place), so here was its content, for posterity:

If you are using PHP < 5.3.0 you can use this function instead:

<?php
function DateTime_getTimestamp(&$dt) {
$dtz_original = $dt -> getTimezone();
$dtz_utc = new DateTimeZone("UTC");
$dt -> setTimezone($dtz_utc);
$year = intval($dt -> format("Y"));
$month = intval($dt -> format("n"));
$day = intval($dt -> format("j"));
$hour = intval($dt -> format("G"));
$minute = intval($dt -> format("i"));
$second = intval($dt -> format("s"));
$dt -> setTimezone($dtz_original);
return gmmktime($hour,$minute,$second,$month,$day,$year);
}
?>

It’s fair to say that’s an interesting approach. The normal way of doing it would be:

<?php $timestamp = $dt->format('U'); ?>

I don’t know what the answer is — moderation has its own problems to do with workload, as PEAR can attest — but a system that’s letting that go up as recommended practice (and stay up for a month) has to be looked at.