Category: PHP

Categories
PHP

Setting a time zone offset in PHP

If your server is in a different time zone than your operations or your user-base, you're going to face some confusion when you use time formats to display things like time last updated, or post times.

The way to resolve this is to use the putenv() function.

[sourcecode language='php']
putenv("TZ=US/Eastern");
[/sourcecode]

To see this in action, run the following bit of code on one of your pages:

[sourcecode language='php']
echo "Original Time: ". date("h:i:s")."\n";
putenv("TZ=US/Eastern");
echo "Adjusted Time: ". date("h:i:s")."\n";
[/sourcecode]

I found a good listing of the time zones at http://www.theprojects.org/dev/zone.txt.

This is a good thing to put in the include that provides the opening page structure for your site.

Categories
Database MySQL PHP

Time Stamp differences in MySQL and PHP

MySQL and PHP handle time and data data in different ways, and it's important to be aware of the difference.

Both these environments have a TIMESTAMP construct, but they're not entirely compatible.

While PHP uses a UNIX timestamp format (an integer representing the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970) MySQL's TIMESTAMP data type uses a YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format.

You can overcome this by using the mysql funtion UNIX_TIMESTAMP() to pull dates in the UNIX format native to PHP.

Making this conversion in your SQL query is generally more efficient and simple than converting in PHP.  Remember, you always want to work your data as much as you can in the SQL query and deliver a clean set of data to PHP.

In fact, if you like you can pull the same attribute in different ways in the same query, creating what I'll call pseudo-attributes, as in;

[SOURCECODE language='sql']SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(date_attribute) AS unix_date,date_attribute AS nice_date FROM mytable;[/SOURCECODE]

This gives you two dates to work with in PHP, represented as unix_date and nice_date for a more human readable format, and balances the processing between your web and database servers.

Categories
PHP

PHP Forms Processing

I could write a long article on PHP forms processing, or I could send you to this very useful article.

Categories
PHP

Capturing the filename from a path in PHP

When you want to isolate the base filename from a path string, this is the way to do it:

[sourcecode language='php']
$path = "/home/project/folder/mypage.php";
$file = basename($path);          // $file is "mypage.php"
$file = basename($path, ".php");      // $file is "mypage"
[/sourcecode]

See dirname() and pathinfo() for related information.

Categories
PHP

Stripping the Query String from a URL in PHP

[sourcecode language='php']
list($shorturl) = explode('?','http://www.website.com.com?page=7');
echo $shorturl;
[/sourcecode]