Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:62636
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: unknown (pb1.pair.com: domain php.net does not designate 82.113.146.227 as permitted sender)
Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2012 21:54:51 +0100 (BST)
To: Will Fitch <willfitch@php.net>
cc: PHP Developers Mailing List <internals@lists.php.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAArmra3oN6NMn-CPn95piNQeKN1LJ7nq3baj1B0z6pCCPZX0VQ@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.02.1209012138510.25835@whisky.home.derickrethans.nl>
References: <CAArmra3oN6NMn-CPn95piNQeKN1LJ7nq3baj1B0z6pCCPZX0VQ@mail.gmail.com>
User-Agent: Alpine 2.02 (DEB 1266 2009-07-14)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] RFC for Adding __toString to DateTime
From: derick@php.net (Derick Rethans)

On Sat, 1 Sep 2012, Will Fitch 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 default should most definitely not be ISO-8601 - as it's a lossy 
format.

> The link to the RFC and patch are here:
> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/datetime_tostring.

> Methods Added
>
> void DateTime::setDefaultPattern(string $pattern)
> string DateTime::getDefaultPattern(void)

This should be descriptive. You are *only* dealing with __toString here. 
Hence the method names should reflect that:

  void DateTime::setToStringFormat(string $pattern)
  string DateTime::getToStringFormat(void)

However, I still don't believe this belongs in the class at all. It is 
rather trivial to do this in userland:

class MyDateTime extends DateTime {
	static $format = "... some format...";
	function __toString() { return $this->format(DateTime::$format); }
}

There, 4 lines. And no quaralling about formats or naming.

> <?php
> $date = new DateTime('2012-09-01 02:43:00');
> print_r($date);

Should not output just:

> DateTime Object
> (
>     [date] => 2012-09-01 02:43:00
>     [timezone_type] => 3
>     [timezone] => America/Chicago
> )

But instead should always have the tostring pattern in there. 

Also, have you checked whether it shows up when you run serialize on it?

cheers,
Derick