Difference between constant DATE_W3C on different PHP versions

Submitted by Jochus on Tue, 12/10/2010 - 00:40 | Posted in:

I came across this "bug" in PHP when I was using the http://drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap module of Drupal on different servers (different PHP versions).

What is XMLSitemap?
The XML sitemap module creates a sitemap that conforms to the sitemaps.org specification. This helps search engines to more intelligently crawl a website and keep their results up to date. The sitemap created by the module can be automatically submitted to Ask, Google, Bing (formerly Windows Live Search), and Yahoo! search engines. The module also comes with several submodules that can add sitemap links for content, menu items, taxonomy terms, and user profiles.

So on the first server, Google was perfectly processing the sitemap.xml file. But on the second server, Google was telling me the format of the sitemap.xml was invalid (including linenumber, luckily :p ...). That was awkward, as I was using the same version of XMLSitemap (version 1.2).

After looking in the XML file, I noticed some differences:
First server:

<lastmod>2010-10-11T15:52:01+00:00</lastmod>

Second server:

<lastmod>2010-10-11T15:52:01+0000</lastmod>

As you can see, there's a colon missing in the second version.
The code which is producing these lines is in xmlsitemap.pages.inc

...
      $link->output .= "\t<lastmod>". gmdate(DATE_W3C, $link->changed) ."</lastmod>\n";
...

The problem is related to the DATE_W3C constant. In PHP 5.1.2, the constant is different to PHP 5.2.14. More information? http://bugs.php.net/36599

I fixed this bug by changing the line into:

...
      $link->output .= "\t<lastmod>". gmdate('Y-m-d\TH:i:s+00:00', $link->changed) ."</lastmod>\n";

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