Question

I am using the below method to calculate when the next time in a schedule of times is.

public static function getNextUtcTimestampFromSchedule($schedule, $timezone)
{
    $timestamps = array();
    foreach ($schedule as $day => $times){
        $dt = new \DateTime('next '.self::getDayString($day), new \DateTimeZone($timezone));
        foreach ($times as $time){
            list($hour, $min) = explode(':', $time);
            $dt->setTime($hour, $min);
            $timestamps[] = $dt->getTimestamp();
        }
    }
    sort($timestamps);
    return $timestamps[0];
}

$schedule is an array, like this:

$schedule = array(
    0 => array('11:00', '17:00'), 
    1 => array('10:00', '18:00'),
    2 => array('09:00', '18:00'), 
    3 => array('11:00', '17:00'),
    4 => array('11:00', '16:00'),
    5 => array('15:00', '16:00'),
    6 => array('11:00', '12:00'),
);

getDayString simply converts, for example, 0 to ‘sunday’.

In order to write unit tests, I need to spoof the time that now() is at, or pass it into the method and use it.

The question is, how can I use that with DateTime?

i.e. DateTime('next wednesday') needs to be told what time ‘now’ is, in order to figure out ‘next wednesday’ in a predictable way, so that it can be unit tested.

Answer 1

The __construct function has an optional param:

public __construct ([ string $time = "now" [, DateTimeZone $timezone = NULL ]] )

An example:

<?php
try {
    $date = new DateTime('2000-01-01');
} catch (Exception $e) {
    echo $e->getMessage();
    exit(1);
}

echo $date->format('Y-m-d');
?>

Edit: You can use strtotime to generate a timestamp, then use date to generate the string to pass to the new object:

$date = new DateTime(date("Y-m-d", strtotime("next wednesday")));