The Zend_Date component offers a detailed, but simple API for manipulating dates and times. Its methods accept a wide variety of types of information, including date parts, in numerous combinations yielding many features and possibilities above and beyond the existing PHP date related functions. For the very latest manual updates, please see our online manual (frequently synced to Subversion).

Although simplicity remains the goal, working with localized dates and times while modifying, combining, and comparing parts involves some unavoidable complexity. Dates, as well as times, are often written differently in different locales. For example, some place the month first, while other write the year first when expressing calendar dates. For more information about handling localization and normalization, please refer to Zend_Locale.

Zend_Date also supports abbreviated names of months in many languages. Zend_Locale facilitates the normalization of localized month and weekday names to timestamps, which may, in turn, be shown localized to other regions.