For one of my projects, I was told to have a different banner load based on the month of the year. So what I did was this:

$today=date(l); // Find what today is? using date function

//Monthly definitions

if($month==January){
echo "<img src='images/january.png' /><br />January";
}

else($month==February){
echo "<img src='images/february.png' /><br />February";
}

 

Before I submit any of my projects, I have someone review it for me. So for this project, I had a friend of mine look it over, and he said it was improper method to accomplish the job. If that's improper, I am curious to find out what the proper method is. Can anyone help?

lower case L in the format argument for date gives you a textual representation of the day. Upper case F gives the month.

 

I'm not sure if this method will always return an English string - could be a locale setting. Using the numeric format is safer - that's lower case M - gives you a values from 01-12.

 

And your code doesn't seem to have quoted the string values you deal with.

 

You also assign the return value to the variable $today - but you compare later on to a variable $month that doesn't seem set.

 

$month=date('m'); // Find what today is? using date function

//Monthly definitions

if($month=='01'){
echo "<img src='images/january.png' /><br />January";
}

else($month=='02'){
echo "<img src='images/february.png' /><br />February";
}

 

 

Not sure what your friend means by improper - you'd have to ask him about that. But it doesn't look like you tested your code.

A sidenote - the <br/> is that really required? Is that placed there for layout purposes?

Or something like this?:

 

$monthnumber = date('m'); 
$monthname = date("F", mktime(0, 0, 0, $monthnumber, 10)); 
echo '<img src="images/'.strtolower($monthname).'.png" />'.$monthname;

 

That should do it!

Assuming it will always return English, that would work. But do you have to create a new time object?

 

$monthname = date("F"); 
echo '<img src="images/'.strtolower($monthname).'.png" />'.$monthname;

Good point... I thought using the mktime would be a way to ensure it was in 'English' format - but I'm not anywhere near enough of a PHP expert to know such things!

Assuming settings will return English names then your 2-liner version will work nicely.

Alternatively, the month images could be named 01-12.

That'd be easier!

Or, if you wanted nice names, put the names of the months into an array and just use the month number to return the right one.

Oh oops. I honestly don't know what my friend was talking about. He said that I wasn't using a valid call when the script tells the server to get the current date. Well I'm glad to know, I didn't completely screw up my code. Strangely the "l" value does work for me. Or at least I think it did. In anycase, I'll just use the numeric method you guys/girls pointed out. Thanks everyone!

Not a valid call? ... I understand what that means...