Forgive me. I am new to PHP and am a little confused by date
manipulation and would appreciate some guidance.
I have a string containing a date which has been parsed from and RSS
feed. This looks something like: "Tue, 25 Mar 2008 04:28:18 -0500" and
is stored in $rssdate

I would like to manipulate this date to correct the timezone
adjustment. (I happen to know that the item I am referencing was
actually timestamped at 09:28:18). I suspect that I have to turn it
into a timestamp (is that correct?)

Attempts to use strtotime($rssdate) have failed... and dropping the
-0500 allows strtotime to complete, but it returns a date of 18 Mar
(which is counter-intuitive, to say the least).

Can anyone offer me any clues?

GorseFox schreef:
> Forgive me. I am new to PHP and am a little confused by date
> manipulation and would appreciate some guidance.
> I have a string containing a date which has been parsed from and RSS
> feed. This looks something like: "Tue, 25 Mar 2008 04:28:18 -0500" and
> is stored in $rssdate
>
> I would like to manipulate this date to correct the timezone
> adjustment. (I happen to know that the item I am referencing was
> actually timestamped at 09:28:18). I suspect that I have to turn it
> into a timestamp (is that correct?)
>
> Attempts to use strtotime($rssdate) have failed... and dropping the
> -0500 allows strtotime to complete, but it returns a date of 18 Mar
> (which is counter-intuitive, to say the least).
>
> Can anyone offer me any clues?

i think you need strtotime:
http://nl3.php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php

and strftime:
http://nl3.php.net/manual/en/function.strftime.php

--
Luuk

GorseFox wrote:

> Attempts to use strtotime($rssdate) have failed...

What version of PHP are you using. Parsing the example date you provided
with strtotime seems to work fine here with PHP 5.2.5.


--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
[Geek of HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux]
[OS: Linux 2.6.17.14-mm-desktop-9mdvsmp, up 21:39.]

Best... News... Story... Ever!
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2008/03/23/hypnotist/

On Mar 27, 10:25 am, Toby A Inkster <usenet200...@tobyinkster.co.uk>
wrote:
> GorseFox wrote:
> > Attempts to use strtotime($rssdate) have failed...
>
> What version of PHP are you using. Parsing the example date you provided
> with strtotime seems to work fine here with PHP 5.2.5.
>
> --
> Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
> [Geek of HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux]
> [OS: Linux 2.6.17.14-mm-desktop-9mdvsmp, up 21:39.]
>
> Best... News... Story... Ever!
> http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2008/03/23/hypnotist/

Toby, I'm using PHP 5.2.5

I have no idea what the problem was, but I have managed to circumvent
the problem. I have no doubt that there is a better way, but this is
the approach I used:

// Now the publication date needs adjusting because the feedburner
provides it with a 5 hour offset
$rss_date_array = explode(" ",$item_published_date); // Get the
components of the date
$tmp[0] = $rss_date_array[1]; // Day
$tmp[1] = $rss_date_array[2]; // Month
$tmp[2] = $rss_date_array[3]; // Year
$tmp[3] = $rss_date_array[4]; // Time of day
$tmpstr = implode(" ",$tmp); // Recreate a string
$offset = substr($rss_date_array[5],1,2); // Grab the hour offset
from UTC
$rss_timefmt = strtotime($tmpstr); // Converts the date from the
feed to a timestamp
$rss_adjusted = $rss_timefmt + ($offset * 60 * 60); // and adjust by
the requisite number of seconds

GorseFox wrote:

> $offset = substr($rss_date_array[5],1,2); // Grab the hour offset from UTC

Why ignore the minutes? Yes, there do exist timezones where the minutes
are not '00'.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
[Geek of HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux]
[OS: Linux 2.6.17.14-mm-desktop-9mdvsmp, up 1 day, 20:47.]

Best... News... Story... Ever!
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2008/03/23/hypnotist/