In his latest post Sameer Borate looks at a library he's recently found that's helpful for working with dates and times, even easier than the DateTime handling built into PHP. The Periodlibrary, part of The League of Extraordinary Packages, aims to "resolve many recurrent issues around time range selection and usage."

Date/time programming is one of the tricky aspects of software development. Although inherently not complex in itself, coding date/time algorithms can be a subtle source of bugs. Especially in web development a feature such as payment subscription processing that ranges from days to weeks to months can get complex quickly. Also such kind of scenarios require additional features like auto renewal, scheduled email alerts to subscribers etc. Such kind of features require good date/time handling algorithms and libraries that handle such chores are always welcome. One such library I encountered recently is Period.

He walks you through the basics first - getting the library installed and creating a new instance of the class to work with. He goes through each of the methods available including the constructor, getting the duration between times and getting the start/end values back as DateTime objects. He also looks at the methods that allow you to create the ranges from various time frames (quarters, weeks, etc), compare ranges and modify time ranges that already exist.