As programmers we should always strive to better ourselves by improving our craft by taking pride that what we build is not only useful, but can continue to be useful for a long time to come. Part of this strategy involves writing code that exhibits resuse, high cohesion, and loose coupling. Therefore every developer should, over time, develop, or at least acquire, sets of tools and code to help achive this goal.

Concepts like frameworks and design patterns help us achieve this. I have been working a few contract projects in PHP lately and have had many opportunities to tweak, fine tune, and improve my home-brewed PHP framework. One of these days I will share this work as a complete framework for download and use, but for now it will simply have to suffice to drop small pieces to the public.

One common task a developer will find themselves doing is manipulating dates. This could be for the purposes of display, SQL queries, or a plethora of other needs, but regardless of the reason having a useful set of classes and functions for manipulating dates and times is handy.

In my framework I have built a simple class to do the most common date tasks that I find myself repeating over and over. In my case I have opted for a class that implements all static methods, so this is not meant to be instantiated. And it is also only intended for PHP 5.2 and higher.

Most the of the functions are pretty simple to follow, and there is ample documentation attached. A couple of items worth noting are the date_parse and the mktime functions. In PHP, the date function is what allows us to format a date into whatever string we desire to craft. The mktime function allows us to specify the values for each part of a date and time string, such as the day, month, year, hour, and so on.

What is usually tricky is making functions to format a date from various sources. For example, a SQL date string usually looks like 2009-02-01, where a user in the United States might enter a value on a form like 2/1/2009. This is where the date_parse function comes in handy. It is smart enough to take these various types of input and split them into their appropriate parts. The end result is an array of its parts. For example.

$date = "02/01/2009";
$split = date_parse($date);

// $split["month"] = "02"
// $split["day"] = "01"
// $split["year"] = "2009"

As we can see the date has been split up into each of its parts. We can then take these parts and pass them to mktime to build the value necessay to pass to the date function for formatting.

I have linked to a download containing my date/time class, as well as the documentation for it. Enjoy, and happy coding!

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