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Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2012 07:31:11 -0400
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To: Will Fitch <willfitch@php.net>
Cc: internals@lists.php.net
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] RFC for Adding __toString to DateTime
From: theanomaly.is@gmail.com (Sherif Ramadan)

On Sat, Sep 1, 2012 at 6:14 AM, Will Fitch <willfitch@php.net> wrote:
> I would like to officially introduce an RFC with a patch to implement
> __toString to DateTime.  This is a commonly requested feature that goes
> unanswered mostly because of the inability to agree on a default pattern.
>
> In short, the patch uses the ISO-8601 format as the default pattern.  The
> pattern may be changed via setDefaultPattern and date_default_pattern_set,
> as explained in the RFC.
>
> The link to the RFC and patch are here:
> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/datetime_tostring.
>
> While I know this isn't as interesting as many of the current proposals
> going on, I'm hoping you can give this RFC a look.
>
> - Will

I think you should consider making the get/setDefaultPattern() methods
into a public string called $format and just put it in the constructor
with an initial value of DateTime::ISO8601

It'd be a much simple implementation and doesn't require introducing
new functions. DateTime can either throw an exception if the format is
invalid or silently fall back to the DateTime::ISO8601

No need to complicate this.