So Jason and I stumbled upon an ugly version dependency. It wasn’t terrible but required special testing and fixing and was annoying for a few minutes.
Jason has PHP version 5.2.6 on his machine. He wrote a php page for me that did some date math using strtotime. Specifically he did this:
$earliest_time = strtotime(
$schedule_items[0]['week'].' +'.$_GET['shiftweeks'].' week');
Nothing exciting here, the week from schedule items is incremented by a number of weeks on the url.
The interesting thing is that the value of shiftweeks can be negative. So now you end up with a string that looks like
2009-03-06 +-2 week
PHP 5.2.6 was happy enough with this.
Then I tried it on my box, which has version 5.2.0. No can do. PHP quietly failed giving a timestamp of 0. Took a few minutes to figure out what was happening. The fix wasn’t hard:
if ($_GET['shiftweeks'] < 0)
$op = "";
else
$op = "+";
$earliest_time = strtotime(
$schedule_items[0]['week'].' '.$op.$_GET['shiftweeks'].' week');
Tags: data types, strtotime, version differences
