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Date: Mon, 4 Oct 2010 09:55:08 +0100 (BST)
To: Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@sugarcrm.com>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] rfc2616 datetime format?
From: derick@php.net (Derick Rethans)

On Sun, 3 Oct 2010, Stas Malyshev wrote:

> > The reason is that in order to format a DateTime object as GMT, it 
> > needs to be converted to GMT... and you can't simply do that with 
> > just a constant consisting of a string of format characters.
> 
> I see what you mean and it makes sense, having constant may imply that 
> you can use it with any date and get proper result... But RFC2616 is 
> the one of the most used formats on the Web - actually, the format 
> that is called COOKIE is not the one that should be used in cookies - 
> RFC2616 should be used instead. COOKIE one uses T, which may or may 
> not be GMT, depending on the date and local system settings. Maybe we 
> should have proper RFC format too, accompanied with appropriate 
> warning that you should use it with GMT dates (or gmdate())?

Well, gmdate() is only part of it; the same constants are also used for 
the DateTime object (which is preferred over timestamps anyway). The 
problem lays exactly there because we can't just convert the timezone of 
an object just for formatting.

I wanted to prevent adding just a format letter for the whole format as 
well (which would partially solve it), but we're almost out of letters. 
Adding a format letter that forces GMT means we would need to loop over 
the whole format string twice, making things highly more complicated.

It is a tricky one, and let's think about whether we can come up with 
something useful here.

cheers,
Derick