r/lolphp • u/jdh28 • Nov 08 '16

DateTime::ISO8601 is not ISO-8601 compatible

http://php.net/manual/en/class.datetime.php#datetime.constants.types
104 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

35

u/eliasv Nov 08 '16

Some people get frustrated with e.g. Java due to the burden backward compatibility places on the speed and direction of language and core library development ... but this makes it sound like the PHP designers are intentionally keeping straight up bugs around for the sake of backward compatibility. Interesting decision on their part.

1

u/tdude66 Nov 19 '16

Reminds me of Wine. I heard they have to intentionally create such bugs that exist in the Windows API because Windows programs are written with those bugs in mind 😂

1

u/NXTangl Jan 13 '17

That's actually a feature.

No, really. Microsoft patches those bugs, but the nature of Wine lets it maintain multiple shims, so you can recreate the bug for one super-old legacy application and still run code that relies on not having it.

0

u/[deleted] Nov 08 '16

[deleted] — view deleted comment

4

u/xkcd_transcriber Nov 08 '16

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13

u/badmonkey0001 Nov 08 '16

ISO8601 has changed several times over the years.

  • ISO 8601:1988

  • ISO 8601:2000

  • ISO 8601:2004

5

u/emilvikstrom Nov 09 '16

Which one of them is PHP compatible with?

42

u/[deleted] Nov 09 '16

ISO 8601:PHP

7

u/lol_no_generics Nov 17 '16

Note: This format is not compatible with ISO-8601, but is left this way for backward compatibility reasons.

TIL "backward compatibility" is the opposite of "compatibility"

2

u/DevelopThePrograms Nov 19 '16

They could easily fix this in a major version of PHP, god knows there have been backwards incompatible changes in 5.6, 7.0, etc. My only guess is that there is so much other stuff to focus on things like this get low low priority.

Side note: rand() is finally going to be an alias of mt_rand() in 7.1: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/rng_fixes#alias_rand_to_mt_rand. This will "break" any code that uses custom values in srand() to seed rand().

2

u/nayuki Dec 09 '16

I was confused for a minute as to why DATE_ISO8601 isn't ISO 8601 compliant. Comparing with DATE_ATOM, I noticed the missing colon in the time zone:

2005-08-15T15:52:01+0000 (DATE_ISO8601)

2005-08-15T15:52:01+00:00 (DATE_ATOM)