[Resolved] Increment Integer & Keep Leading Zero's

sherif_1

Hi All,

Im stumped with this one, I am trying to create a timestamp. This timestamp will be used as a unique ID. So the timestamp is as follows:

$time = date('His');

If I

echo $time;

, thats fine.

However my problem occurs with any time that is before 9AM!. You see, I have my server set to 24 Hour time, however, when I create my time I always increment one like below:

$time += 1;
echo $time;

(Dont ask why I Increment one - long story). The problem is but, if the time is < 9AM
it prints "93433", however if it is after 9AM it prints the leading zero fine "103444" etc..

Basically my problem is:

1) When I incrmement a value with a leading zero, I loose the leading Zero
2) How do I keep it??

Mordecai

Keep in mind that 093433 is not a number, it's a string. You'll have to treat the stamp as such.

BTW, all of this would be solved if you used a standard UNIX timestamp.

sherif_1

... cant.. im on windoes nt box 🙁

any sugesstions?
and If i would call date() every time i wanted it to, it still wouldnt work, becuase I call it a few times on the page and it would all still print the same second (when i want the seconds to appear increasingly ++ )

rachel2004

I don't run PHP under Windows, but I can't see why this wouldn't work under NT or 2K:

$timestamp = time();

Creating a UNIX timestamp does not mean you need to be running UNIX or Linux. It just means you're creating a timestamp of the number of seconds that have passed since Jan 1, 1970.

BTW, do you need the timestamp for the script or to insert into a MySQL database? If you're going the database route, then just use the column type "timestamp" in MySQL.

I know this doesn't solve the intial post question about the leading zeros, but now that you're aware of the time() function, you can circumvent your existing problem with a workaround.

Hope this helped.

Weedpacket

Just wondering what this "unique" id is being used for; if it gets used twice within the same second, it won't be unique any more...

edrugtrader

come on... who would look at a webpage twice in one second...

sherif_1

it is unique to the user

i work in a warehosue & reporting team, and just finished a project where by a user can query reports themselves using a couple of forms

im creating unique job ID's for each user in the format of username_ddmmyy_$time

$time needs to be with a leading 0' because my receving shell script uses $time to figure out its queue mechanism.

anyways - thanks for the feedback..

if anyone cares- this is what i have resolved to (using sprintf())

$time = sprintf("%06d",$time); 	//return the string re-formatted with leading 0's to complete hhmmss

echo "finaltime: $time";

thanks

Weedpacket

Originally posted by edrugtrader
come on... who would look at a webpage twice in one second...

Can easily happen, but it's irrelevant because the same user would be getting the same session ID. Whoop-de-do. Now: how busy could a site be if two different people look at the same page within a second of each other?

So yes, you would need to add more information identifying the user, as sherif_1 does.