Spell 2003 in words using the Date()?

[shelbytll]

Hi,
is it possible to spell out "TWO THOUSAND THREE" for year 2003 using the Date()?

[HalfaBee]

No.
You will have to do it manually.

$year = array( '','One','Two' ..... )
echo "Two thousand and ".$year[(int)date( 'y' )];

HalfaBee

[mcgruff]

No.

http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

But, you could create your own function to map the integer value to text.

Assuming you just want to support the current millenium only, the start text will always be "two thousand and .." (oh damn I just created another millenium bug).

Next, find the first non-zero integer in the year number after the "2" - this and the remaining numbers are the year.

We'll all be dead before 2100, and for convenience we could ignore 2000, so that just leaves mapping 1-99 against an array of text values for the corresponding year (add the mapped text to the "two thousand and .. " string).

Whoever inherits your site can deal with any legal issues resulting from a failure to support 2100+.

Programming is all about getting this joke:

A geography teacher, a physics teacher, and a programmer went on holiday to Wales where they encountered a black sheep.

The geographer said: "gentlemen, I have just made an amazing discovery: all Welsh sheep are black."

The physics teacher replied: "oh no, my good friend: this only means that, in Wales, there is at least one sheep that is black."

Then the programmer pipes up: "gentlemen - you are both wrong. All that we know for certain is that, in Wales, there is at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black."

[Rahmon]

Mcgruff,

Nice one, but my 1 year old toddler programmes. I believe the guy will still be around in 2100 and beyond. How can we accomodate 99<y<infinity ?

Flexibility is the idea.

[Weedpacket]

Oh, poo. And here's me going around pronouncing it as "twenty-oh-three".

[mcgruff]

The basic principle is the same.

It gets kind of clumsy with a thousand or so integer values to map to text strings. You wouldn't want to run through an array of a thousand values, or a single switch/case with a thousand cases.

Maybe I'd start thinking about nesting switch/cases. For example, ten top level cases for 100's, 200's, 300's etc, ten inside that for 10's, 20's, 30's etc, and finally ten inside that for 1,2,3 etc.

Just a rough sketch - something like that to try and do it all reasonably efficiently.