Need PHP Date advanced and tricky coding

Question

Please try to understand the problem first.

I want PHP code to find the difference between two dates (number of days) in php and store the result as numeric/int value in a variable in php

I know date_diff() function will be used. But How ?? I'm using wampserver 2.2 on Windows 7 My PHP version is 5.3.12 Please help

"numeric/int" so which is it? Also, days, weeks, months or minutes? An Example would be good. — Philipp, Jul 30 '16 at 18:19
added an answer using the `DateTime` class and `date_diff()` function. — Philipp, Jul 30 '16 at 18:39
Possible duplicate of [How to calculate the difference between two dates using PHP?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/676824/how-to-calculate-the-difference-between-two-dates-using-php) — Philipp, Jul 30 '16 at 19:08

Philipp · Accepted Answer · 2016-07-30T18:39:25.910

2

$date = new DateTime('2014-01-31');

$date2 = new DateTime('2014-02-04');

$diff = date_diff($date, $date2, true);
$difference = $diff->format("%a"); // 4

This will give you the difference in days. If you want something else than days you can see the possible formats here: http://php.net/manual/en/dateinterval.format.php

As you can see, the function date_diff() is very easy to use. It will return you an DateInterval object, which you can then format to give you the desired result.

edited Jul 30 '16 at 18:39

answered Jul 30 '16 at 18:26

Philipp

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I cold not understand the statement var_dump($diff->format("%a")); Actually I need the number of days between two dates to be assigned to a numeric variable.so that I can use tha variable later in the script – Rocky Alex Jul 30 '16 at 18:48
@RockyAlex It was just to display the value which is returned by `$diff->format("%a")`. If you take the snippet as it is now `$difference` will have the value 4 and you can work with it like with any other variable – Philipp Jul 30 '16 at 18:52
@RockyAlex So is there a problem/error with this code? – Philipp Jul 30 '16 at 19:47
1

Thank u it worked ultimately. Actually I was having some other logical errors which I fixed today. – Rocky Alex Jul 31 '16 at 08:14

score -1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 30 '16 at 18:23

The best solution that I can think of is converting the date to timestampand then getting the difference. An example is :-

$date1 = date('Y-m-d H:i:s');
$date2 = date('Y-m-d H:i:s'); //I know it's same, it will be different in your case.
//conver it to timestamp now
$date1_timestamp = strtotime($date1);
$date2_timestamp = strtotime($date2);
//calculate difference.
$difference = $date2_timestamp - $date2_timestamp;
//the difference variable holds an int value.
//however, if you want to convert it back to readable date, you can do it like this
$difference_readable_date = date('m/d/Y', $difference);

To yield the number of days take the above result and divide by 86,400. — Jake Psimos, Jul 31 '16 at 01:52

score -1 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 30 '16 at 18:40

my function for all the odds one or 2 times , date or timestamp..

 function time_Diff($time2_, $time1_ = false) {
        $date1 = new \DateTime();
        if ($time1_) {
            $time1 = preg_match('/[-\/]/', $time1_) ? strtotime($time1_) : $time1_;
            $date1->setTimestamp($time1);
        }
        $date2 = new \DateTime();
        $time2 = preg_match('/[-\/]/', $time2_) ? strtotime($time2_) : $time2_;
        $date2->setTimestamp($time2);
        $interval = $date1->diff($date2);
        $diffrent_ = $interval->format('%Y Years %m Months %d Days %H:%I:%S');
        $diffrent = str_replace(['00 Years', ' 0 Months', ' 0 Days', '00:00:00'], '', $diffrent_);
        $returner = str_replace(['01 Years', ' 1 Months', ' 1 Days'], ['01 Year', ' 1 Month', ' 1 Day'], $diffrent);
        return trim($returner);
    }

Need PHP Date advanced and tricky coding

3 Answers3