I need to generate a string of incrementing dates, something like this:
(year, month, day, hour, minute) 2010, 2, 12, 11, 30 2010, 2, 12, 11, 31 etc
I would suggest checking out PHP's built-in functions: date and mktime. Used together you can achieve what you want.
As an example to increment the day taken directly from the website.