If you are sending and receiving data through a REST API, you will eventually need to convert the date to a string and vice versa because JSON doesn’t have a native data structure to represent DateTime. All date libraries work by giving you access to convenient data structures to represent a DateTime. As a programmer, you need to understand the basics and be able to appreciate the problems that date libraries solve to make the most out of them.Īlso, date/time libraries can only take you so far. The bugs that come up due to its incorrect understanding can be extremely difficult to understand and fix, even with the help of date libraries. However, we often use date libraries without thinking about how date/time actually works.

You can find a reliable date library for both the front end and the back end to do most of the heavy lifting for you. They greatly simplify date parsing, date arithmetic and logical operations, and date formatting. DateTime Libraries Help If You Understand Them Correctlyĭate libraries help in many ways to make your life easier. The potential difficulties with DateTime calculation discussed in this article are only the tip of the iceberg, but they’re still helpful to know about, with or without a library. Here we will explore some of the key concepts that are necessary for manipulating date and time values correctly, formats that are convenient for storing DateTime values and transferring them over APIs, and more.įor starters, the right answer for production code is almost always to use a proper library rather than rolling your own. In this article, I’m going to help you think clearly about date and time fields and suggest some best practices that can help you avoid date/time hell. This in-depth guide to DateTime manipulation should help you understand the programming concepts and best practices relevant to time and date without having to browse through a sea of information on this topic.

There are hundreds of articles on the topic out there, however, most are either too academic, focusing on nitty-gritty details, or they are too patchy, providing short snippets of code without much explanation accompanying them.

Handling date and time fields is certainly not rocket science but can often be tedious and error-prone. Almost every app a developer builds will have some component where date/time needs to be obtained from the user, stored in a database, and displayed back to the user.Īsk any programmer about their experience handling dates and time zones and they will probably share some war stories. As a software developer, you can’t run away from date manipulation.

Php http convert milliseconds to time