Brian Moon has a reminder about date handling in PHP - days are not always 86400 seconds long, sometimes there's "leap seconds" included too. Thankfully, there's easy ways around it:

The problem with this is that it assume that there are only 86400 seconds in every day. There are in fact not. On days when the clocks change for daylight savings time, there are either 1 hour more than that or 1 hour less than that. In addition, there are also leap seconds put into our time system to keep us in line with the sun. There is one this year, 2012, on June 30th in fact. Since they don't happen with the regularity that daylight savings time does, it may be easy to forget those. Luckily, for this problem, the solution is the same.

His first solution involves letting strtotime do the work for him, internally calculating the leap seconds or any other issue that might come up. As an alternate solution, he also mentions "doing your math at noon" - this gives you enough leeway to make the offset leap seconds could cause a much smaller risk.

On PHPClasses.org today they've released their latest episode of their "Lately In PHP" podcast - episode #17. In this new episode Manuel and Ernani talk about PHP-GTK in a web browser and the proposed PHP 5.4 release date.

PHP 5.4 beta 2 was just released, so the final version of 5.4.0 is coming soon. Many PHP Developers want to know when it will be the final PHP 5.4 release date. Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert talk about this and other interesting PHP related topics in episode 17 of the Lately in PHP podcast.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the full mp3 or by subscribing to their feed to get this and past episodes (including ones about MODX and PHPFog).

On the WebInOne blog there's a post about doing some date validation in CodeIgniter 2 forms using the "set_validation" method.

I wrote a tutorial here about the CI date. At that post I used the HTML <select> for the input of date. Sometime our client can want to use text box for the date input. We need the validation for this date. I have found this code from here. It is for CI 1.7.* and PHP 5.2.*. So I change some code for the CI 2.0.* and PHP 5.3.*.

There's some code snippets included in the post showing how to use it in the form (HTML), setting the validation on the form object (for US and UK validation) and the actual code of the updated custom Validation class.

Slawek Lukasiewicz has a new post today about working with dates and times in PHP on a more object-oriented fashion than in the more traditionally procedural way of just calling PHP date/time functions on the string values.

Date and time manipulation in PHP is mostly connected with functions like: date, time or strtotime. They can be sufficient, but if we want to deal with dates like with objects - we can use DateTime class. DateTime class is not only straightforward wrapper for standard functions, it has a lot of additional features - for example timezones.

He shows how to use the DateTime functionality to return an object you can call several different methods on. He gives examples of the formatting call, comparing one DateTime object to another, how to update the date after the object's created, calculating the difference between two dates and iterating through a certain time period.

On the XpertDeveloper.com site there's a post reminding you of an date could cause all sorts of problems with your PHP application - the effects of the Y2K38 bug.

Y2K38, or the Unix Millennium Bug, affects PHP and many other languages and systems which use a signed 32-bit integer to signify dates as the number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970. The furthest date which can be stored is 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038. Beyond that, the left-most bit is set and the integer becomes a negative decimal number or a time prior to the epoch.

If you're worried about your application's support for date and time handling, there's a pretty simple fix - replace your current handling with the DateTime functionality. This handles them correctly.

James Cohen has a new post to his blog today looking at some of the built-in functionality that PHP has to work with dates and times including simple things like strtotime and the DateTime feature.

A lot of people ask questions relating to date and time in PHP. Here are some answers to the most commonly asked questions and common mistakes.

He covers the differences between working with dates in strtotime, worrying about timezone settings and compares the strtotime/DateTime methods for formatting and returning dates, modifying dates, converting between timezones as well as finding the difference between two timezones.

In a new post to his blog today Rob Allen shows you how to create compound form element handling in a Zend Framework application thanks to some custom work with Zend_Form and Zend_View extensions.

A little bit of googling found this site http://codecaine.co.za/posts/compound-elements-with-zend-form which has not unfortunately disappeared, so the code in this article owes a lot of the author of that article. It turns out to be remarkably simple to create a single Zend Form element that is rendered as multiple form elements. We create an element object and a view helper object and we're done.

He shows how to create a custom form date helper that extends the base XHTML to create the isValid/getValue methods for handling the complex date input. There's also the code for the view that creates the custom date input and repopulates the content if there's a need.

Brian Swan has a new post to his blog today looking at one of the connection options for the SQL Server driver in PHP - the "ReturnDatesAsStrings" setting that can make handling date and time information simpler for PHP.

This is short post to address a frustration I've seen mentioned on Twitter and in forums a lot: By default, the SQL Server Driver for PHP returns datetime columns as PHP DateTime objects, not strings. This can be especially frustrating if you are not aware of the ReturnDatesAsStrings connection option. By simply setting this option to 1 (or true) when you connect to the server, datetime columns will be returned as strings.

He includes some sample code showing how to use the setting (as a part of the settings array passed in to sqlsrv_connect) and the resulting array key from the fetched results on his sample table. This just gives you one more option for handling dates in your SQL Server-based application, especially if you don't need the full DateTIme object's functionality.

New on the Web Builder Zone today, there's an article about DateTime in PHP5 from Giorgio Sironi introducing you to this very handy built-in feature.

PHP has made some progress here as well, for example with the Standard Php Library and its interfaces. Though, the SPL is incomplete and oriented to performance more than to object-oriented programming: take a look at the SplStack and SplQueue implementation containing 20 different methods to get the idea. However a little gem is shipped with each PHP installation: the datetime extension, which contains the DateTime class and its siblings. Ideally, everything you can do with date_* functions, you can do it with this class.

He includes some code that shows the DateTime object in action as a part of a PHPUnit test case - adding days, subtracting months, date difference and its support of operator overloading. There's also mention of Doctrine's native support for the extension.

In a new Zend Framework related post to his blog today Rob Allen takes a look at a different operating mode he found with Zend_Date changing how it handles format specifiers.

I discovered recently that Zend Framework 1's Zend_Date has two operating modes when it comes to format specifiers: iso and php, where iso is the default. When using Zend_Validate_Date in forms, I like to use the php format specifiers as they are what I'm used to and so can easily know what they mean when reviewing code that I wrote months ago.

His example code shows how you can use the standard date formatting strings in a Zend_Form validator (the "php" format) and an example using the Zend_Date::MONTH or Zend_Date::YEAR identifiers (the "iso" format). He also shows how he met two other requirements - validation for empty and a consistent format on the date validation ("Y-m-d").