RFC 1123 dates in PHP

2012-09-03 | date | PHP | rfc

While playing with REDbot I realised my last-modified headers (being sent by PHP) were not RFC 1123 complaint. A complaint date looks like Sun, 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 GMT. There are two ways to generate such a date in PHP;

if you have pecl_http >= 0.1.0, then
```
http_date($timestamp)
```

or if you don’t want to use pecl

gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s', $timestamp).' GMT'

or if you have PHP >5.2 you can use the DateTime constant
```
gmdate(DATE_RFC2822, $timestamp)
```

an example of it’s use:

header('Last-Modified: ' . gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s', $lastModified).' GMT');