Intro to Carbon Package: A PHP Extension of DateTime

As any PHP developer will know: working with dates and times in PHP can be a challenging task. Especially while working on comprehensive e-commerce platforms like I do, complex date and time calculations are usually inevitable. Fortunately, the Carbon Package provides a powerful and intuitive solution. It is a popular date and time library that is built on top of PHP’s native DateTime class. It provides a fluent API for creating, manipulating, and formatting dates and times in a wide range of formats.

Here are some more reasons why you should consider using Carbon Package:

• Simplifies date and time manipulation: The Carbon package provides a simple and intuitive API for working with dates and times in PHP. It makes it easy to perform common operations like adding or subtracting time intervals, formatting dates and comparing dates.
• Time Zones: Carbon has timezone support, which is essential for working with dates and times across different time zones. It simplifies the process of converting dates and times between different time zones, and ensures that your code behaves consistently regardless of the server or client time zone.
• Extensible: Carbon is a powerful and extensible package, which means that you can customize it to make it fit your specific needs. You can create your own date and time formats, add support for additional time zones, and extend the functionality of the package to include additional features.
• Widely used and well documented: Carbon is a widely used package, and as such it has a large community of developers who contribute to its development and provide support through forums and documentation. It means that there are many resources available for learning and using the package effectively.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the Carbon package for PHP and how it can simplify your date and time handling tasks.

Installing and implementation

You can find the package on its original website at Nesbot Carbon. It is recommended to use composer, which is a dependency manager for PHP. On the page, you can find all the necessary information about installation and setup. Open your terminal and let the guide navigate you. Of course, don’t forget to update your dependencies afterwards.

Usage

Carbon Package aims for clear and easy usage across a number of areas. Here are some of them:

• Date manipulation: With Carbon, you can easily perform date calculations and manipulations, such as adding or subtracting days, weeks, months, or years from a given date.

• Timezone support: Carbon provides support for working with different time zones. You can easily convert a date and time to another timezone, and also determine the offset between time zones.

• Date formatting: Carbon offers a range of formatting options that allow you to format a date and time in a human-readable way.

//Outputs referencing a random date

PHP manual (found here: PHP: DateTimeInterface::format — Manual) offers a chart of formats that has been used mostly in DateTime Class, but also in Carbon Package. The Carbon package additionally has formatting functions, which is much more practical than digesting all the parameters in the chart.

• Easy comparability: Carbon makes it easy to compare dates and times, and to determine if a date is before or after another date or in between.

DateTime Class vs Carbon

Comparing the two methods of handling date and time manipulation helps us see the differences easily. As an example, I calculated the delivery date using processing and delivery days of a product and applying rule to skip weekends, as you can see in the code below. I did it in two different ways:

Increasing readability

With its easy and understandable structure, Carbon Package increases the readability of the code. The names of the functions are compatible with their missions. This makes it possible to intuitively understand the functionality of the code by just reading the names.

Moreover, Carbon helps us to facilitate maintenance of the code. Since the code already looks neat and tidy, you can see defects or mistakes right away, and then make the necessary changes accordingly.

Conclusion

I strongly recommend using the Carbon package while coding, both to my co-workers and developers at large. It is the cleanest and most legible way to show date and time operations in PHP. Plus, as I’ve shown, it’s easy to set up, practical in usage, and smooth in maintenance.

Got thoughts or questions? We want to know what you think. Reach out to me at astar.bekturov@turbinekreuzberg.com.