Format date to iso.8601

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I’m working with the wordpress XMLRPC to post some future posts to my blog, but I’m running into some issues with date formatting… basically got myself all discombobulated 🙂

So I’ve set up the “future” post date. It’s just fine.

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$thetime = date("Y-m-d H:i:s", strtotime("+ $number days", strtotime(date("Y-m-d H:i:s"))));

($thetime echos out the date i’m shooting for – so all is well here)

But the wp client wants the date in ISO.8601 format. So I changed it this way: 

$content['date_created'] = date( 'c', strtotime($thetime) );

But I’m getting a response from the xml-rpc client that it’s malformed.

So how would you go about changing $thetime to iso.8601 format since I thought that’s what ‘c’ does? Am I doing something wrong?

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2 comments

  1. First, verify the outputted string and make sure that the output is what you expect. There may be a completely unrelated bug (for example a forgotten debugging echo) in there.

    Some implementations may require the date to be in UTC time. Simply use gmdate instead of date, and add a Z at the end:

    $content['date_created'] = gmdate('Y-m-d\TG:i:s\Z', strtotime($thetime)) . 'Z';

  2. According to XMLRPC specifications, datetime is defined in this tag <dateTime.iso8601>
    and has this format 19980717T14:08:55. So the complete tag looks like this
    <dateTime.iso8601>20090322T23:43:03</dateTime.iso8601>

    This is the common mistake when using php xmlrpc_encode_request() function, which does not automatically convert date. Rather use xmlrpc_set_type() function.

    <?php

$params = date("YmdTH:i:s", time());
xmlrpc_set_type($params, 'datetime');
echo xmlrpc_encode($params);

?>

    The above example will output something similar to:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<params>
<param>
 <value>
  <dateTime.iso8601>20090322T23:43:03</dateTime.iso8601>
 </value>
</param>
</params>