What's the best way to handle dates and times in PHP prior to 5.3?

Well, found out that I built a relatively large program built on top of DateTime, onl开发者_开发问答y to find most of what I used there got added in PHP 5.3. The server I have to deploy to does not run 5.3. (And it's a Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) box which doesn't have a 5.3 package in the main repo, and I'm not allowed to install anything not in the main repos on that box...)

1. Is there some way to get a copy of the date and time function reference as was current for 5.2.4?
2. What is the best way to pass dates around? ints containing unix epoch times?

When passing data around, I prefer to use unix timestamps. If you have a different representation, you can use strtotime() to convert it.

There are a few functions that come in handy when working with dates & times. it looks like a lot of what is done w/ the DateTime object can be handled with some combinations of these methods:

• date
• time
• mktime
• strtotime

also, just a clarification on your terminology, the unix epoch is the moment all unix timestamps count from, which is midnight, Dec 31, 1969.

Always using unix timestamps as int for date/time no matter of mysql version.