Today being it is our 16th wedding anniversary I decided it would be appropriate to build a small script to keep track and post a message automatically on our special day together. I wanted this program to remember what year of our anniversary it was without me having to remind it: a great use for a variable.
Something worth noting is 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th will work with the $the_suffix … but what about 21st, 22nd, 23rd? Do we need to add filtering or does the date PHP function offer something to automatically provide this for us?
In fact it does! It’s called the ‘S’ suffix and works good as a date parameter for dealing with this situation. For example:
This will output the proper 20th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 24th, etc format.
Now how can this be made to work on any number, not just a date because I’m optimistic that we’ll be together beyond 31 years. One solution is to create your own function, as robf did and posted to Zend in the way of an ordinal($number) function.
I remained curious, though if we could fake a date in years, and then strip the first part of the years off to cover any possible usage of anniversary numbers and not have to resort to using our own function? We can do this up until our 69th annivesary using mktime(), date and substr() functions using the following code:
Definitely not the most practical code on the planet, nor anything I’d ever use beyond just playing around aloud here, but I was trying to stretch my brain for other possible ways to do this using built-in PHP functions.
Have I missed a built-in PHP ordinal number function that works like the S suffix in date()?
I’m sure my wife would rather get flowers than flowery code. I better get on that!