Servage Magazine

Programming should be object oriented. This is a message we get from everywhere nowadays. Back ind the old days, PHP scripts were looong series of includes, functions and global variables. Not anymore. And we should be grateful, because the object oriented way of doing things, really has improved our code, and made it easier to understand and extend. However, there are a few scenarios where I miss the cold old call of a global function that does some kind of minimal functionality. Convenience functions. But is the usage of convenience functions still legitimate today? Is it OK to define a random function somewhere global, and just use it here and there, across your project? I would say: It depends! Let me show you an example where I think, even today, that it’s perfectly reasonable and fine to use global functions.

The MySQL timestamp

Creating timestamps for your MySQL queries with PHP involves the use of the date() and time() functions. If you wish to add the current time to a MySQL query, you need to do something like date(‘Y-m-d’, time()). And how often do you need this? I found to use this type of code line quite often, so I have allowed myself to create a global function called timestamp() which I can call everywhere.

function timestamp($time = false) {
  if(!$time) {
    $time = time();
  }
  return date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $time);
}

This type of functions is something that I still consider legitimate to use as custom defined global function, because it is used across the entire project, many different places, is is similar to core PHP functions like time() and date().