[RESOLVED] Confused over date format

amax

Hi all, Im currently building a form whereby all dates must be in the following format - 2012-01-01T12:00:00.1020000-00:00
I am really confused as to how I would echo out todays date in that format ie. <?php echo date("Y-m-d" etc etc );?>
Can someone please explain how I would get these parts. I get the y,m,d h,m, seconds, but not the parts at the end

bradgrafelman

amax;11008909 wrote:
all dates must be in the following format - 2012-01-01T12:00:00.1020000-00:00

That's not a format, that's an example of a format.

What's the actual format? What do all of those example values represent?

dalecosp

Who specced the form? Looks like some kind of microtime adjustment, but ... then why that at the end?

amax

Yes, I have never seen a format like that before. It was from a lady who owns a website on the other end, and her exact words are: "Please note that all dates must be in the following format - 2012-01-01T12:00:00.1020000-00:00 Where the +/-nn:nn at the end represents the time offset from GMT/UTC" That is all the information I received in the connection document so am totally stumped with the example of the format given and what the ".1020000-00:00" example given means at the end. Anyone any ideas based on this?

bradgrafelman

amax;11008945 wrote:
what the ".1020000-00:00" example given means at the end. Anyone any ideas based on this?

It's as dalecosp suggested above; the .1020000 represents a microtime adjustment of 102 milliseconds. The "-00:00" is, of course:

amax;11008945 wrote:
the time offset from GMT/UTC

It's basically an ISO 8601 date with microtime resolution. Assuming you don't care about being accurate to the millisecond, note you could always just supply a microtime adjustment of all zeros. Otherwise, you'd have to do some string splitting and concatenation to get the decimal value from [man]microtime/man.

If the decimal portion of the time is absolutely required and can't assumed to be zero, then you'll have to build up the ISO 8601 date piece-by-piece using [man]date/man. Otherwise, you might try using [man]date/man and see if that works.

amax

Perfect, thanks for all guys, that did the job