What's the best way to handle dates and times in PHP prior to 5.3?

Question

Well, found out that I built a relatively large program built on top of DateTime, only to find most of what I used there got added in PHP 5.3. The server I have to deploy to does not run 5.3. (And it's a Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) box which doesn't have a 5.3 package in the main repo, and I'm not allowed to install anything not in the main repos on that box...)

1. Is there some way to get a copy of the date and time function reference as was current for 5.2.4?
2. What is the best way to pass dates around? ints containing unix epoch times?

Answer 1

When passing data around, I prefer to use unix timestamps. If you have a different representation, you can use strtotime() to convert it.

There are a few functions that come in handy when working with dates & times. it looks like a lot of what is done w/ the DateTime object can be handled with some combinations of these methods:

• date
• time
• mktime
• strtotime

also, just a clarification on your terminology, the unix epoch is the moment all unix timestamps count from, which is midnight, Dec 31, 1969.

Answer 2

Always using unix timestamps as int for date/time no matter of mysql version.