And again to the list, since for some reason "Reply-to-all" did not do as intended this time. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Andrew Ballard <aballard@xxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 12:53 PM Subject: Re: Function mktime() documentation question To: Tedd Sperling <tedd.sperling@xxxxxxxxx> On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 12:07 PM, Tedd Sperling <tedd.sperling@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: [snip] > I am just looking for one that is easy to explain to students. > > Cheers, > > tedd tedd, Since you are teaching this to students, I would recommend sticking with the internal date functions and avoiding any solution that includes adding or subtracting multiples of the magic number 86400.* Many such "solutions" fail to take into consideration Daylight Saving Time and are therefore guaranteed to be wrong at least twice a year (if not several months out of the year). Sure, you can write your code to handle the differences correctly, but since the rules governing the time shift are mostly arbitrary and differ across time zones the world over, it seems safer to me to rely on the internal functions when working with dates. Andrew * Even if the internal functions base their calculations on the number of seconds per day, they have at least already handled all the varied time zones and DST rules and been tested in environments all over the world. When those rules change, the internal functions will be adjusted to reflect the changes and should be much more reliable than thousands of instances of multiple strategies that get copied and pasted into projects. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
