Anatomy of a Function

It’s been a little while since my last post. My recent work schedule and Turkey Day played a part in that. I’ve been working .com hours on a super cool project. (I mentioned the TERRA group in an earlier post.) I’ve learned so much in the last couple of weeks. It’s amazing what a hard deadline and a shifting set of requirements will do to your web programming skills. All the hard work is about to bear fruit as as the new TERRA web site is about to go live. Have a look at a different kind of digital library.

But, that’s not the point of this post… I wanted to share a little code that made some data conversion very simple over the course of the TERRA project. It’s a simple little php function that converts a MySQL timestamp into an RFC 822 date format (For the project, we stored the item update fields as timestamps and then converted them when we generated our various XML feeds. RFC 822 or RFC 2822 are necessary for valid feeds.) Here’s the php function in all its glory:

//function converts mysql timestamp into rfc 822 date
function dateConvertTimestamp($mysqlDate)
{
$rawdate=strtotime($mysqlDate);
if ($rawdate == -1) {
$convertedDate = ‘conversion failed’;
} else {
$convertedDate = date(‘D, d M Y h:i:s T’,$rawdate);
return $convertedDate;
}
}
//end dateConvertTimestamp

You call the function by including it on the page and using the following code:

$newPubdate = dateConvert(“$stringToConvert”);
echo $newPubdate;

Where $stringToConvert would be any MySQL timestamp value that needs conversion.

In the end a string like this “2005-05-17 12:00:00” looks something like this “Tue, 17 May 2005 12:00:00 EST”. You could also reverse the conversion using this php function:

//function converts rfc 822 date into mysql timestamp
function dateConvert($rssDate)
{
$rawdate=strtotime($rssDate);
if ($rawdate == -1) {
$convertedDate = ‘conversion failed’;
} else {
$convertedDate = date(‘Y-m-d h:i:s’,$rawdate);
return $convertedDate;
}
}
//end dateConvert

NOTE: If/when you copy and paste the above code, make sure all ” (double quotes) and ‘ (single quotes) are retyped. WordPress is doing a number on the proper format.

I just wanted to share the wealth a bit. If you’ve got questions or suggestions, don’t be shy about dropping a comment. I’ll be home in Wisconsin for the next several days, but I’ll have limited internet access there.  I’ll try to answer questions if they arise.