On the ThinkPHP blog today, Annika Rabea shares a method for outputting dates in words rather than in the usual numbers most applications use.

Recently, I have to output the age of a date in words and didn't have a framework to work with. The first steps were to parse the given date into an array and create a timestamp with the individual parts. The difference between the timestamp of now and the created timestamp yielded the age in seconds. The result can be used to compare with seconds of a day, week, etc.

The code snippet in the post outputs the difference between two timestamps (then and now) it a bit more friendly way (ex. 4 months, 2 weeks, 2 days).

Hasin Hayder has posted his own response to a recent "relative time" article (showing users things like "received 2 days and 3 hours ago") with a more precise method for doing something similar:

This function is production ready and you can use it in any of your application which mainly works with these date difference. I have found it somewhere in web, just forgot the source. Thanks to the unknown author of this excellent function.

The rest of the post is the function itself that takes in the interval string (formatting), the start date, end date and whether to use timestamps or not.

Derick Rethans has posted about a new function he's whipped up for PHP's date/time functionality to handle the differences between US formatted dates and the British date formats - date_create_from_format.

From PHP 5.3 the new date_create_from_format() function and the DateTime::createFromFormat() factory method are available. As first argument they accept the expected format, and as second argument the string to parse.

He includes two examples - one showing it being used to parse a British date string and the other to show off the date_get_last_errors function that can be useful for debugging.

Sara Golemon shares an interesting bit of stats in her latest post - the release dates from the major PHP version releases since PHP 4.0.0.

Someone recently posed the question: "How can I find out when a particular version of PHP was released?" I pointed him to CVS main/php_version.h, then went about taking my own medicine. Here's what I got from a quick scan of the cvs log for that oft-touched file in case anyone else gets curious...

The list (of 48 items) shows a few fun things she points out - PHP's 7th birthday is coming up next month (May 2007), the file was usually tagged before the actual release date, and version 4.0.4's info points to an invalid file so its date is a guess at best.