How can I tell if a datetime field in MySQL is in the past with PHP?

Question

I'm building a website for a school, with a place the teachers can add assignments. All these assignments are stored in a MySQL table, with a field of type datetime that stores the due date. I'm looking for a way, with PHP, to check if the due date is in the past so I can provide visual feedback for the teachers and students. Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

I would use PHP's date comparison tools. Here is an example:

$date1 = new DateTime("now");
$date2 = $yourDateFromTheDatabase;
if ($date2 < $date1) {
    //it still has time
} else {
    //time has passed
}

Does that help? You can find more examples here: http://php.net/manual/en/datetime.diff.php

Answer 2

You could actually handle this with MYSQL in your query, which i would find easier because then you don't have to handle dates in php. For example:

SELECT DueDate, (DueDate < CURDATE()) FROM table;

(DueDate < CURDATE()) returns 0/1

otherwise:

Compare given date with today

Answer 3

Depending on how you're storing dates into the datetime field (hopefully you're using TIMESTAMP), you can use the PHP strtotime function, which parses the MySQL timestamp into a Unix timestamp which can be used for comparing PHP values. Here's an example:

$res = mysql_query("SELECT datetime FROM assignments;");

while ( $row = mysql_fetch_array($res) ) {
    $date = date("g:i a F j, Y ", strtotime($row["date"]));
}

And do your comparisons with the $date variable. That's a super broad and rough look at an idea, but hopefully it helps somewhat.

You can read more about this concept here.

Good luck!