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Doc Bug #66510 Important information missing in docs of DateTimeZone::listAbbreviations
Submitted: 2014-01-18 00:11 UTC Modified: 2017-01-28 16:55 UTC
Votes:1
Avg. Score:3.0 ± 0.0
Reproduced:1 of 1 (100.0%)
Same Version:1 (100.0%)
Same OS:1 (100.0%)
From: jonathan at hogervorst dot info Assigned:
Status: Closed Package: Date/time related
PHP Version: Irrelevant OS:
Private report: No CVE-ID: None
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 [2014-01-18 00:11 UTC] jonathan at hogervorst dot info 
Description:
------------
---
From manual page: http://www.php.net/datetimezone.listabbreviations
---

Important information about the return value of this function is missing in the documentation. For example, the fact that historical timezones are included is very relevant.

The lack of this information results in actually wrong scripts. See for example this (kind of popular) code (and my comment): http://stackoverflow.com/a/2839396/251760

I have added a comment to the documentation, trying to explain the return value of this function and informing people of the 'risks' of using this function when not considering this: http://www.php.net/manual/en/datetimezone.listabbreviations.php#114161

Hopefully the documentation can be enhanced :-)

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 [2014-01-19 17:30 UTC] kulakov74 at yandex dot ru 
They should add a description for all the timezone abbreviations, cause names like 'yst' and 'yert' don't make much sense and, more important, they should add the periods of time when the zones were effective. 

At the same time, provided the periods are added to the info, I can hardly imagine a php developer who will want to find the right abbreviation for a date (the one that was effective for the date) by scannning the list, because the internal PHP functions like date(), strtotime() and the DateTime class already do it automatically for you whenever they perform date manipulations. 

So I doubt DateTimeZone::listAbbreviations() is needed at all.
 [2017-01-28 16:55 UTC] cmb@php.net
-Package: Documentation problem +Package: Date/time related
 [2022-05-13 14:16 UTC] git@php.net 
Automatic comment on behalf of derickr
Revision: https://github.com/php/doc-en/commit/fd8fcbcd6f1e2482e32bb544bbc23b8dc154bb91
Log: Fixed bug #66510: Clarify the return values of DateTimeZone::listAbbreviations
 [2022-05-13 14:16 UTC] git@php.net
-Status: Open +Status: Closed
 
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