Can php cast?

dustsmoke

OK, probably an easy question.

If I am trying to pass a date through the URL, I cannot do anything with it $_REQUEST["date"];

e.g. date("Y-m-d",$_REQUEST["date"]); = no worky

Now in Java and every other language I have ever worked with we could cast these strings into dates, integers, etc, etc, etc. (Convert.ToDate, toint, etc...)

I tried to find 'cast' on php's site and didn't come up with anything. Does this mean one must explode 'everything' by hand just to use information? like explode it out and mktime(0,0,bleh) to put it back together?

That can't be......

AstroTeg

I've done date handling in Java and ASP and I know where you're coming from. But check out [man]strtotime[/man].

As long as you get the date in some meaningful form, strtotime will attempt to figure out what you meant and generate a Unix timestamp which then can be used with date(). What makes it pretty cool is it'll validate the input and if a user puts something not groovy in the date, it'll attempt to work around it (8/32/2004 would convert to 9/1/2004).

Otherwise, PHP pretty much only has strings and numbers as variable types.

ppowell

You apparently can also cast something as an object type as well:

$a = 'Hello World';
print_r((object)$a); // SHOULD PRINT stdClass Object ([Hello World])

I just did it a few minutes ago as a test.

Phil

dustsmoke

thanks AstroTeg! That should do it.