Back to Index

Working with Dates

FEAST contains a powerful Date class \Feast\Date that is designed to make working with Dates and Times simple. While it overlaps some behavior of the built-in DateTime class, it does not extend it.

Creating Date objects

Setting Properties and Manipulating Dates

Getting Textual Representation

Getting Other Information

Getting a DateTime object

Comparing Dates

Creating Date objects

There are multiple methods for creating a \Feast\Date object.

Creating from Unix Timestamp

createFromTimestamp takes two parameters - the Unix Timestamp (or number of seconds since Midnight on Jan 1 1970) and an optional timezone string. If no timezone string is passed in, it will default to the current server timezone.

Create from the current time

createFromNow creates a \Feast\Date object from the current unix timestamp. It can optionally take a string representing the timezone. If no timezone string is passed in, it will default to the current server timezone.

Create from String

createFromString will create a \Feast\Date object using the strtotime call. It takes in a string representing the date to create, and an optional timezone parameter.

Create from a pre-determined format string

createFromFormat will create a \Feast\Date object by first creating an intermediary DateTime object. The method takes a format string, a string representing the date, and an optional timezone representation.

Create via time parts

If you wish to create a \Feast\Date object from a set of date parts, you can instead call new \Feast\Date() The constructor has the following parameters (and default values, if noted)

1. Year
2. Month
3. Day
4. Hour - Defaults to 0 (or midnight)
5. Minute - Defaults to 0
6. Second - Defaults to 0
7. Timezone - Defaults to null, thus defaulting to the server timezone.

Setting Properties and Manipulating Dates

After instantiation, you can set various properties. See the method list below

1. setTimezone - Takes a string representing the timezone.
2. setYear
3. setMonth
4. setDay
5. setHour
6. setMinute
7. setSecond

In addition, you can modify the current \Feast\Date object by calling modify with a string representing the change to make. For example 5 days will increase the current object by 5 days. -4 hours will decrease it by 4 hours. Under the hood, this uses the PHP built-in strtotime function and all the limitations thereof.

Getting Textual Representation

The \Feast\Date class contains many methods for retrieving information about the Date, including some shorthands.

1. getTimestamp - Returns the Unix Timestamp of the object as an int.
2. getYear - Returns the 4-digit year as a string.
3. getMonth - Returns the 2-digit month as a string.
4. getDay - Returns the 2-digit day as a string.
5. getHour - Returns the hour in 24-hour format as a string. Eg: 6pm is 18.
6. getMinute - Returns the minute as a string.
7. getSecond - Returns the seconds as a string.
8. getDayOfWeek - Returns the day of the week in numeric format as a string. 0 is Sunday, 6 is Saturday.
9. getDayOfYear - Returns the day of the year (0-365 inclusive) as a string. Jan 1st is 0, Dec 31 on a non leap year is 364.
10. getFormattedDate - Returns the date in the chosen format. See the PHP manual for formats. Some class constants exist on the \Feast\Date class to make working with format strings easier.
11. __toString - Returns the date in Y-m-D H:i:s format. Casting the object to string will call this method.

Getting Other Information

The \Feast\Date class contains methods for checking if it is Daylight savings time or a leap year.

1. isDaylightSavingsTime
2. isLeapYear

Getting a DateTime object

If you wish to operate on PHP's built-in DateTime object, the method getAsDateTime will return an instance of the DateTime class.

Comparing Dates

The \Feast\Date class contains 4 methods for comparing with other \Feast\Date objects. These methods all take another \Feast\Date as their only argument.

1. greaterThan
2. greaterThanEqual
3. lessThan
4. lessThanEqual