Having trouble with syntax...

Carlo_Gambino

I'm experimenting with the date functions, quite unsuccessfully I must say.

I created a small script to tell the number of days in the current month, but I must be missing something because there is no output.

<html>
<head>
<title>How many days in this month?</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php
$month=date("n");
if ($month==1) echo "31";
if ($month==2) echo "28";
if ($month==3) echo "31";
if ($month==4) echo "30";
if ($month==5) echo "31";
if ($month==6) echo "30";
if ($month==7) echo "31";
if ($month==8) echo "31";
if ($month==9) echo "30";
if ($month==10) echo "31";
if ($month==11) echo "30";
if ($month==12) echo "31";
?>
</body>
</html>

It seems like it should work but I'm most definitely missing something. Thanks in advance for your help.

bretticus

works for me, are you sure you have php parsing the page at all? What happens if you insert...

echo "current month:" . date("n");

...at the top of your php code?

Carlo_Gambino

I'm a dingbat- sorry!

might help if I turned the server on and ran the pages through that rather than my development machine.

A blonde moment and I've had no coffee so I suppose it serves me right! I should just go back to bed!

bradgrafelman

If you're trying to get the number of days in the month, why not replace all of that code with:

echo date('t');

Carlo_Gambino

That is simple!

Thanks for the input. I'm really just playing around with the code to learn it, so this was as far as I'd gotten by myself so far. Thanks again!

bradgrafelman

Just for syntax purposes, you could also shorten your code in a couple of ways:

if ($month==1 || $month==3 || $month==5 || $month==7 || $month==8 || $month==10 || $month==12) echo "31";
else if($month==4 || $month==6 || $month==9 || $month==11) echo "30";
else echo "28";

if(in_array($month, array(1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12))) echo "31";
else if(in_array($month, array(4, 6, 9, 11))) echo "30";
else echo "28";

switch($month) {
    case 1:
    case 3:
    case 5:
    case 7:
    case 8:
    case 10:
    case 12:
        echo "31";
        break;

case 4:
case 6:
case 9:
case 11:
    echo "30";
    break;

case 2:
    echo "28";
    break;
}

Again, however, for this specific application you should use the date() function instead, since February doesn't always have 28 days.

Carlo_Gambino

I must admit, my head is spinning.

I'm coming from only having made static web pages and I have very little experience with programming. I picked up PHP and have been doing pretty well, but all the alternatives are a little confusing and difficult to commit to memory!

Thanks for the help, it's nice to see other (usually better) ways of doing things!

m_tt

Don't forget mktime comes in handy if you need to get the number of days in a specific month.

date("t", mktime( 0, 0, 0, 1 /* Month */, 1 /* Day */, date("Y") /* Year */ ) );

All months

for( $i = 1; $i <= 12; $i++ )
{
	echo date("t", mktime( 0, 0, 0, $i, 1, date("Y") ) ) . "\n";
}