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Open Source Technologies

Notes 8.10 Keywords

DST Issues: Every year around October, at least 10-25 bugs are reported when a day is listed
twice in somebody’s overview. Actually, the day listed twice is the date on which DST.

Gmmktime(): Functions create a timestamp based on parameters passed when the function is
called.

GMT: Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is a term originally referring to mean solar time at the
Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London.

Here-Docs: Here-docs enable you to embed large pieces of text in your scripts, which may
include lots of double quotes and single quotes.

ISO 8601: ISO 8601 Data elements and interchange formats–Information interchange–
Representation of dates and times is an international standard covering the exchange of date
and time-related data.
Parsing: Parsing a sentence means to computer the structural description (descriptions) of
the sentence assigned by a grammar, assuming of course, that the sentence is well-formed.
Mathematical work on parsing.

Strings: A string is series of characters, therefore, a character is the same as a byte. That is, there
are exactly 256 different characters possible. This also implies that PHP has no native support
of Unicode.
UNIX timestamp: PHP has a range of functions that handle date and time. Some of these
functions work with a so-called UNIX timestamp.

8.11 Self Assessment Questions

Fill in the blanks:

1. PHP has a range of functions that handle date and time. Some of these functions work
with a so-called ____________________ .

2. The opposite of ____________________ is parsing a textual description of a date into a
timestamp.

3. Single Quotes in addition to double quotes, single quotes may also delimit
____________________.
4. ____________________ automatically sets that offset to the said character.

State True or False:
1. The easiest way of obtaining the current time is with the time() function.

(a) True (b) False
2. Strings in PHP are a sequence of characters that are always internally null-terminated.
(a) True (b) False
3. Here-docs enable you to embed large pieces of text in your scripts.

(a) True (b) False
4. The __toString( ) method is currently only called by the print and echo language constructs.
(a) False (b) True

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