I am building a package that heavily relies on the current week number of the year as well as the forthcoming 4 or 5 week numbers. I know that sounds kind of confusing but lets say this week amounts to the 51st one of the year. The next 4 week numbers would be:
My Question:
How reliable is PHP's date() function? The library isn't very well documented and the comments underneath make me a little nervous about using it. I am using the following to get the current week number:
echo $weekNumber = date("W");
Is that a reliable way of working with dates? Any recommendations? I am not very good with dates and times and the sheer size of the various functions available in PHP's native library has left me very confused (time(), strtotime(), date() etc).
I've just done a quick test with the following code:
echo date('W', strtotime('2011/12/31')) . '<br>';
echo date('W', strtotime('2011/12/31 +1 week')) . '<br>';
echo date('W', strtotime('2011/12/31 +2 week')) . '<br>';
echo date('W', strtotime('2011/12/31 +3 week')) . '<br>';
Here we start with the 31st Dec 2011 (last day this year), then we print 3 more W weeks, which gives this output:
52
01
02
03
04
Which does exactly what you want. If PHP's date() function didn't work properly, it would have either been removed (bad!), or rewritten until it did work.
I would worry more about the reliability of the system clock.