Lorna Mitchell shares a quick code snippet she's worked up to make handling local-sensitive dates in PHP a bit easier (via the strftime function).

I needed dates like "Donderdag 23 Oktober", and I was sure PHP should know how to do this without me creating arrays for days of the week and months of the year. With some help from my friend (thanks Derick) I discovered that there is a date function in PHP that takes into account the locale of the script, called strftime.

Her code snippet shows how to set the correct local time (in her case, nl_NL with a UTF-8 encoding) and how to return a formatted string based on formatting characters (much like printf/sprintf).

The Zend Developer Zone has the latest two of their security tips posted today - numer #8 and #9 - in their "PHP Security Tips" series.

• In tip #8, they restate and reinforce a topic that's worth repeating - validating user input. They use the filter_var function as a simple, light way to start filtering your user's input.
• Tip #9 suggests that you keep anything sensitive, anything at all that needs to be kept away from prying eyes, outside of your document root of the site.