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Request #45483 Add an era designater to DateTime methods when formatting or parsing dates
Submitted: 2008-07-11 10:18 UTC Modified: 2021-09-29 16:24 UTC
Votes:1
Avg. Score:5.0 ± 0.0
Reproduced:0 of 1 (0.0%)
From: tj at systisoft dot com Assigned: derick (profile)
Status: Wont fix Package: Date/time related
PHP Version: 5.3CVS-2008-07-11 (CVS) OS: All
Private report: No CVE-ID: None
View Developer Edit
 [2008-07-11 10:18 UTC] tj at systisoft dot com 
Description:
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It is currently not possible to specify an era designator in a format when parsing or formatting dates with DateTime::createFromFormat or DateTime::format.

An era designater would be BC or AD as in 1/1/0200 BC or 1/1/2004 AD.

I don't know which format char would be good since 'G' which is used in some other format patterns as era designator seems to be already taken.

Reproduce code:
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N/A

Expected result:
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N/A

Actual result:
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N/A

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 [2008-07-15 11:47 UTC] tj at systisoft dot com 
There should also be a possibility to format a year without the sign, because if you format with 'Y' you will get something like:

-2000 BC

This can either be done by an new format char for unsigned year or that the 'Y' format is omitting the sign when a format char for the era designator is present.
 [2008-07-17 08:50 UTC] tj at systisoft dot com 
On further thinking there should be a new format char for BC dates because Y formats the date with year 0 which is conforming with ISO8601.

But years in the proleptic Gregorian calendar do not have a year 0. The year 0 in ISO8601 is 1 BC in the proleptic Gregorian calendar.
 [2010-12-20 14:25 UTC] jani@php.net
-Package: Feature/Change Request +Package: Date/time related
 [2017-10-24 07:52 UTC] kalle@php.net
-Status: Assigned +Status: Open -Assigned To: derick +Assigned To:
 [2021-09-29 16:24 UTC] cmb@php.net
-Status: Open +Status: Wont fix -Assigned To: +Assigned To: derick
 [2021-09-29 16:24 UTC] cmb@php.net 
Most details of the date extension, such as leap years and
seconds, timezones, DST, do not apply to the the proleptic
calendar anyway, and ISO 8061 states that "values in the range
[0000] through [1582] shall only be used by mutual agreement of
the partners in information interchange".  I suggest to use the
calendar extensions for such dates (a parser might be implemented
by a simple sscanf() or preg_match()).  Therefore I'm closing this
as WONTFIX.  Derick might disagree; please re-open in that case.
 
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