strtotime() for windows pre-1970? anyone?

acidbox

Anyone seen a function or a class that does this? I looked at the ADOdb date functions but they don't include a fix for strtotime not woking on pre 1970 dates. I am trying to port some software that I wrote to windows and I REALLY don't want to have to go back through the whole thing and have to hack it up. I have used strtotime to convert many different types of date strings to time.

Roger_Ramjet

Since strtotime works with Unix timestamps you can't. Base was 1970, so pre 1970 would be minus value = meaningless. Winders on the other hand does not use the unix timestamp so can cope with all sorts of dates.

Weedpacket

Originally posted by Roger Ramjet
Since strtotime works with Unix timestamps you can't. Base was 1970, so pre 1970 would be minus value = meaningless. Winders on the other hand does not use the unix timestamp so can cope with all sorts of dates.

Let's be accurate about this. Unix systems that implement Unix timestamps as 32-bit signed integers (i.e., most of them) have no trouble with negative timestamps - they cover the period 1900-1970. It's Windows that implements them as 32-bit signed integers and then chokes when the sign bit is set. (Even more accuracy is given in the Note on the strtotime manual page).

Roger_Ramjet

Thanks weeddpacket, I stand corrected. Should make sure I know what I'm talking about, but then I would not touch a Unix timestamp with a bargepole myself. I'm sure they seemed like a good idea at the time,especially as the guy's at Bell were stuck with a PDP7. Just seem silly now.

acidbox

Yes, strtotime works back to 1900 on linux but not on windows. Does anyone have a resolution on this issue?

Roger_Ramjet

Write your own date handler? Not the answer you want to hear, I know, but it's what I had to do to pass Access dates to mysql. And never use unix timestamps again.

acidbox

I don't think I want to do that. I wish the guys at ADOdb would finish their implementation of strtotime. They say it is on the todo list. I used their date() replacement and it worked great.

Weedpacket

If it's a matter of parsing date strings supplied by the database then you don't really need the full strtotime() carry-on: if you know the format then it's just a matter of string processing to turn it into a set of variables (or an array) containing the year, month, day, hour, minute and second. PEAR's Date() package provides a bunch of methods for working with such dates.

I've been known to store dates and times using astronomers' conventions (who have a particular interest in being able to specify times sometimes thousands of years ago with resolutions on the order of a second). (Fractional) Julian Days represent the time as days and fractions of a day since an epoch of 12:00:00 UTC, 24 November 4713 BC (Julian (proleptic) calendar). As I write this it's 2005-01-20 07:57:56 UTC, which translates to a JD of 2453390.83191, which fits into a double-precision floating point number with a roundoff error of less than a second.

PHP offers Julian days in its calendar extension, but not the fractional parts.