User:Lucamauri/Sandbox/ParserTime

Temporary page to improve documentation from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:ParserFunctions##time as discussed in.

#time
This parser function takes a date and/or time (in the Gregorian calendar) and formats it according to the syntax given. A date/time object can be specified; the default is the value of the magic>Special:MyLanguage/Help:Magic words#Date and time|magic word   – that is, the time the page was last rendered into HTML.



The list of accepted formatting codes is given in the table to the right. Any character in the formatting string that is not recognized is passed through unaltered; this applies also to blank spaces (the system does not need them for interpreting the codes). There are also two ways to escape characters within the formatting string: In addition, the digraph  is interpreted as a single literal "x".
 * 1) A backslash followed by a formatting character is interpreted as a single literal character
 * 2) Characters enclosed in double quotes are considered literal characters, and the quotes are removed.



The  can be in any format accepted by PHP's strtotime function. Both absolute (eg ) and relative (eg  ) times are accepted.


 * &rarr; 
 * &rarr; 
 * &rarr; 
 * &rarr; 
 * &rarr; 
 * &rarr; 
 * &rarr; 

The  in ISO 639-3 (?) allows the string to be displayed in the chosen language

The  parameter specifies if the date/time object refers to the local timezone or to UTC.

This is a boolean parameters: its value is determined by casting the value of the argument (see the official PHP documentation for details on how string are cast to boolean values).

See the following examples for details:





If you've calculated a Unix timestamp, you may use it in date calculations by pre-pending an  symbol.



Full or partial absolute dates can be specified; the function will "fill in" parts of the date that are not specified using the current values:



A four-digit number is always interpreted as a year, never as hours and minutes:

A six-digit number is interpreted as hours, minutes and seconds if possible, but otherwise as an error (not, for instance, a year and month):

Input is treated as a time rather than a year+month code.

Although 19:60:09 is not a valid time, 196009 is not interpreted as September 1960.

The function performs a certain amount of date mathematics:



The total length of the format strings of the calls of   is limited to 6000 characters.

Time Zone issue
There is a bug in this #time parser function (more specifically in PHP DateTime) that does not allow the passing-in of non-integers as relative time zone offsets. This issue does not apply when using an on-the-hour time zone, such as EDT. For example:

However, Venezuela is on a -4.5 hours time offset from UTC, and thus using its time zone will not normally allow the correct calculation of a relative time zone offset. Here's what happens:

To workaround this issue, simply convert the time into minutes or seconds, like this:

(Tim Starling, the developer of this function, provided the exact syntax for this solution.)

#timel
This function is identical to  , when the  parameter is set to , so it always uses the local time of the wiki (as set in ).

Syntax of the function is:



For instance, see the following examples: