In the third edition of my “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide” book, titled “[intlink id=”1582″ type=”page”]PHP 6 and MySQL 5 for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide[/intlink]”, I went out on a limb and used a beta version of PHP 6 when writing the book. PHP 6 was about half-way done at the time, and I didn’t want to complete the book, only to have it be outdated immediately thereafter (using PHP 6 wasn’t, by the way, an attempt to trick the reader into buying the book, as some cynical people have suggested). Well…[intlink id=”1067″ type=”post”]PHP 6 ended up dying due to many complications[/intlink] and I had the proverbial egg on my face (what one reader rightfully called my “Dewey Defeats Truman” moment). In truth, only about 5% of the book or so required PHP 6, so it wasn’t a devastating mistake, but I certainly felt foolish.
One of the things I wanted to cover in PHP 6 was locale-aware date and time formatting, as part of the goal of PHP 6 was to recognize the more global Web environment. Even though PHP 6 was shelved, the key components have since been integrated into PHP 5.2, 5.3, and the forthcoming 5.4. Locale-aware date and time formatting was demonstrated in the book using the PHP 6 date_format_locale() function. That function went belly-up, and PHP 5.3 now has the IntlDateFormatter class instead. The documentation for the class in poor, but here’s what I figured out…
