RE: [PHP] date frustrations

There is probably a better way than this... But I always use EPOCH when
I need to put something in order... You can then just write a function
to interperate the date when it need to be readable.... Hope that makes
sense

joe

-----Original Message-----
From: Shena Delian O'Brien [mailto:shena@darklock.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2003 1:52 PM
To: php-general@lists.php.net
Subject: [php] date frustrations


Ok so on a web application I needed to list the files in a directory,
ordered by last modified date.

I was pulling them out in an array, fetching the filemtime() for each
file, and trying to order them by that date. I was using asort() to sort

the files in an array so they'd list chronologically.

Well that wasn't working as planned. Files were getting out of order. I
figured asort() could have been having trouble ordering dates
numerically, so I tried strtotime() on the dates first, and ordered the
files by unix timestamp.

That didn't work either. I did a date() on the unix timestamp fetched by

strtotime() and found that the dates were coming out inaccurately. 2003
was being changed to 2013, etc.

Well I gradually figured out that the date format output by filemtime()
was not an acceptable natural language date format. filemtime() was
fetching dates with a dash - ex. 07-08-2003. strtotime() was making
incorrect timestamps because it doesn't read dates with dashes formatted

that way. Apparently asort() reads dates the same way strtotime does.

I think this is kind of perverse... in order to fix it I had to do an
ereg_replace("-","/",$date) in order to change the filemtime() date
format to one properly readable by strtotime and asort.

*sigh*

Am I the only one who has noticed this? Is this something that can be
corrected in PHP? (Perhaps the dates fetched by filemtime() etc can be
changes to be formatted in a way that is acceptable to other date()
functions??)


--
PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/)
To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php