Less than operator not wokking in date

Question

Less than operator not working while comparing date

   $today="27-02-2015";
$end="24-06-2015";
if($end < $today){
echo "yes";

}else{
echo "no";
}

Has to be a string, "27-02-2015", otherwise you're just doing math. Also, it should be wrapped around "strtotime". — Dave Chen, Feb 27 '15 at 07:13
possible duplicate of [PHP - Compare Date](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2113940/php-compare-date) — Dtex, Feb 27 '15 at 08:02

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 27 '15 at 07:21

You are doing a string compare here, which does not tell you which date is later/earlier. You could change these dates into DateTime and compare them

$a = DateTime::createFromFormat('d-m-Y', '27-02-2015');
$b = DateTime::createFromFormat('d-m-Y', '24-06-2015');

if ($b < $a) {
    echo " do something here";
}

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 27 '15 at 07:20

2

change the string to format "2015-02-27" - then year is first, then month and you can compare like numbers

answered Feb 27 '15 at 07:20

n-dru

9,285
2
29
42

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 27 '15 at 07:21

0

It should be

$today=strtotime("27-02-2015");
$end=strtotime("24-06-2015");
if($end < $today){
 echo "yes";

}else{
echo "no";
}

answered Feb 27 '15 at 07:21

Mihir Bhatt

3,019
2
37
41

Produces the wrong result (try it out [here](http://writecodeonline.com/php/);you have to add this statement `date_default_timezone_set ( 'UTC' );`). – collapsar Feb 27 '15 at 07:37
@collapsar result is okay, it's just warnings. – Forien Feb 27 '15 at 07:49
@Forien thx. i missed the actual output among the 'warning...' blurb – collapsar Feb 27 '15 at 08:29

collapsar · Answer 4 · 2015-02-27T07:41:22.110

Build Date objects from string specified in the way your locale settings mandate and compute the differences on epoch millisecond:

$s_today = '02/27/2015';
$s_end   = '06/24/2015';

date_default_timezone_set ( 'UTC' );   # required by strtotime. Actual value doesn't matter as you are interested in the date diff only 
$today = strtotime($s_today);
$end   = strtotime($s_end);

if ($end < $today)  {
    echo "less ( $s_today < $s_end )";
} else {
    echo "more ( $s_today > $s_end )";
}

Note

@n-dru's approach is viable too. It depends which date specs your code fragment must cope with and if you wish to perform more computations on the dates. In the latter case I'd opt in favor of normalization to the epoch seconds. Otherwise it proabably isn't worth the hassle.

Less than operator not wokking in date

4 Answers4