determining how seconds since epoch was generated

toastyghosty

I'm wondering if someone can point me in the right direction. I tried searching all over these forums and googling without finding anything that could help me figure this one out.

I have a database with items that have a timestamp stored in a field called "timestamp" in the format of seconds since epoch. These were created via a form text input and using the strtotime() function.

In order to make it display friendly when pulling it back out of the database I'm using the date function. eg: date('F j, Y',$timestamp);

Now when the date is initially inputed and submitted to the database they may or may not contain the actual day of the month. eg. both August 1983 and August 1, 1983 are valid.

Is there a way to determine via the timestamp value whether a day was in fact included or not?

Right now if no day is specified for an entry it will display the day as the 1st of the month.

Thanks everyone!

stevesweetland

its probably fair to presume that strtotime() will presume the 1st of august 0:00:00 1983 if you only give it "August 1983"... you could presume that if its the first of the month, then someone hasnt given a day.

but you're only going to be guessing, cause if someone puts "August 1, 1983" then well, you're going to suggest that they didnt give a day, when they did.

toastyghosty

yes that's exactly my problem, that would be assuming every 1st of every month was a non-entered day.

So then there is no way of determining with certainty whether or not the 1st of each month was actually a day that the user specified or simply generated as a result of only submitting a month and year?

Installer

Since information is stored physically (i.e. there is no "metaphysical" byte hovering over the field), you'll need to put such information into storage yourself. Like in a field named, for example, "day_entered" with a value that can be resolved to "yes" or "no".