Introduce my PHP time conversion library

Some time ago I saw this tweet from @dantleech.

I know a library that converts some things, called “php-conversion” from Christoffer Niska. It can be found here. But this library has more than one context for conversion and is a less good API in my opinion.

While thinking about the problem, the PHP implementation of Martin Fowler’s money pattern came to my mind. And in Germany there’s a saying: “Time is money”. So why can’t currencies be time units? ;-)

So I implemented this pattern for time and the result of this idea is now available on https://github.com/tommy-muehle/php-time-conversion The library comes with three logic parts. Converting, comparing and operating.

To understand that, here’s an example:

use TM\TimeConversion\Time;
use TM\TimeConversion\Unit;

// initialization
$tenWeeks = Time::fromValue(10.0, Unit::WEEK);

// convert
$tenWeeksInDays = $tenWeeks->convert(Unit::DAY);

echo $tenWeeksInDays->getAmount(); // 70

// compare
var_dump($tenWeeks->equals($tenWeeksInDays)); // true

// operate -> subtract
echo $tenWeekInDays->subtract(Time::fromValue(10, Unit::DAY)); // 60

More examples can be found here.

I don’t care if this solves Dan’s problem but it was a lot of fun for me to implement and test this library. And maybe someone is searching a fully unit-tested and working library to handle time.