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.

I've spent a lot of time with ODBC recently, working on interfacing our PostalEngine product with SQL Server. One of the things that caused me a LOT of trouble is binding date/time values into our stored procedure calls. One of the reasons that it was hard work was lack of documentation-by-example.

When this [code] is run, the execute fails with SQLSTATE 22008, Date time overflow. Everything looks correct in the code, and most of the values we're passing are based on the description of the parameter provided by ODBC, so what's going on?

After "several hours", he figures it out, the problem being a result of the precision field. He also includes an example of the "magic number" to put in their field to get things to parse correctly...