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Volodya sends us some bad date handling code in PHP. Which, I know, you're just reaching for the close tab and yawning when you hear that. You've seen it before. But bear with me, this one still has some fun bits to it.
$monthes = array(
1 => 'Января', 2 => 'Февраля', 3 => 'Марта', 4 => 'Апреля',
5 => 'Мая', 6 => 'Июня', 7 => 'Июля', 8 => 'Августа',
9 => 'Сентября', 10 => 'Октября', 11 => 'Ноября', 12 => 'Декабря'
);
This creates a list of months.
if ( $team->have_posts() ) :
// Start the Loop.
while ( $team->have_posts() ) : $team->the_post();
Today, I have learned something about PHP. PHP has an alternate syntax for blocks. Instead of if { statements }, you can do: if : statements endif. Just one more quirk of PHP to make the language more confusing.
This block checks have_posts in an if, and then checks it again in a while, meaning we don't need the if at all, but so it goes. We haven't gotten to the date handling yet, so let's look at that.
$date = get_the_date();
$d1 = explode(".", $date);
if ($d1[1][0]=='0')
$m = $d1[1][1];
else
$m = $d1[1][0];
?><div class="date"><?php echo $d1[0]." ".$monthes[$m]." ".$d1[2]; ?></div>
We get the date as a string, and then split it out into date parts. This is, of course, highly locale specific, but clearly they know what locale they're in. Then they look at the array of date parts. The second element holds their "month" string, as two digits, so they look at the digits. If the month string starts with a 0, they grab the second character and put it in $m. Otherwise, they grab the first character and put it in $m. Then they use $m to look up the $monthes.
Unless there's some substring weirdness going on that I don't know about, this code… doesn't work? Right? Since they're grabbing only a single character out of $d1[1] every time, for months later in the year, $m is only ever going to hold 1, and thus we only output Января, meaning we get four months of January, which just seems cruel, honestly, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.
As with all bad date handling code, this could easily be fixed by just using the built in functions, even in PHP. What I'm going to take away from this though is that PHP's syntax lets you write in Visual Basic or Ruby if you're determined enough. And you can mix and match, so enjoy a codebase that has :/endif and {} scattered throughout.
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