How to get minutes in the form of hours days weeks months years PHP

Question

I am struggling very hard to achieve this but the results are not what i am trying to get.The result values are wrong and the colons are not on their proper place when using random minute values(that should generate years : months : weeks : days : hours : minutes) from such as 1500, 2800 .etc

I want to convert Minutes into respective years : months : weeks : days : hours : minutes

What i have tried?

$minutesConverter = function($from,$to,$format='dynamic'){
    $year    = floor($from/525600)    ? floor($from/525600)     : '';
    $Rminutes= $from%525600;
    $month   = floor($Rminutes/43800.048)  ? floor($Rminutes/43800.048)  : '';
    $Rminutes= $from%43800.048;
    $week    = floor($Rminutes/10080)     ? floor($Rminutes/10080)     : '';
    $Rminutes= $from%10080;
    $day     = floor($Rminutes/1440)      ? floor($Rminutes/1440)      : '';
    $Rminutes= $from%1440;
    $hour    = floor($Rminutes/60)        ? floor($Rminutes/60)            : '';
    $minute  = $from%60               ? $from%60               : '';            

    if(!empty($year)  ){ if($year   > 1 ){ $year    = $year.' years';     }else{ $year   = $year.' year';     }  }
    if(!empty($month) ){ if($month  > 1 ){ $month   = $month.' months';   }else{ $month  = $month.' month';   }  }
    if(!empty($week)  ){ if($week   > 1 ){ $week    = $week.' weeks';     }else{ $week   = $week.' week';     }  }
    if(!empty($day)   ){ if($day    > 1 ){ $day     = $day.' days';       }else{ $day    = $day.' day';       }  }
    if(!empty($hour) ){ if($hour    > 1 ){ $hour    = $hour.' hours';     }else{ $hour   = $hour.' hour';     }  }
    if(!empty($minute)){ if($minute > 1 ){ $minute  = $minute.' minutes'; }else{ $minute = $minute.' minute'; }  }  

    if(!empty($year))  { $year   = $year;   }
    if(!empty($month)) { if(empty($year)){ $month  = $month; }else{ $month  = ' : '.$month; } }
    if(!empty($week)) { if(empty($month)){ $week  = $week; }else{ $week  = ' : '.$week; } }
    if(!empty($day)) { if(empty($week)){ $day  = $day; }else{ $day  = ' : '.$day; } }
    if(!empty($hour)) { if(empty($day)){ $hour  = $hour; }else{ $hour  = ' : '.$hour; } }
    if(!empty($minute)) { if(empty($hour)){ $minute  = $minute; }else{ $minute  = ' : '.$minute; } }
    
    return $year.$month.$week.$day.$hour.$minute;
};

Example:

For using minute value as 131400 i,e 3 Months(according to google calculator) But the output of this is:

2 months6 hours

Problems?

1. No colons

2. Wrong Readable time

Help Needed ! Kindly take a look.

Answer 1

The main issue with your code is that you should be subtracting the number of periods times the period length from $from on each pass, not taking the modulus of $from with the period length. This is because not all your periods are multiples of all the smaller ones (e.g. 1 month is not an exact multiple of weeks). The code can also be signficantly simplified by the use of an array of periods, for example:

$minutesConverter = function($from) {
    if (!$from) return '0 minutes';
    $periods = array('year' => 525600,
                     'month' => 43800,
                     'week' => 10080,
                     'day' => 1440,
                     'hour' => 60,
                     'minute' => 1);
    $output = array();
    foreach ($periods as $period_name => $period) {
        $num_periods = floor($from / $period);
        if ($num_periods > 1) {
            $output[] = "$num_periods {$period_name}s";
        }
        elseif ($num_periods > 0) {
            $output[] = "$num_periods {$period_name}";
        }
        $from -= $num_periods * $period;
    }
    return implode(' : ', $output);
};

echo $minutesConverter(131390, 0);

Output:

2 months : 4 weeks : 2 days : 9 hours : 50 minutes

Demo on 3v4l.org

Answer 2

Not a direct answer to your question, but maybe an idea and a template.

I had a similar problem years ago. I wanted to display a duration (time stamp into the past) as relative time. So I create the function below and had the following prerequisites:

• Short format.
• Fixed field width (6+strlen(separator)).
• No month, because the length of month varies too much.
• Units are the abbreviations of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and years.
• Support of german and english abbreviations.
• Limit the output to 2 units. More doesn't help a reader.
• Option separator between 2 units.

And here is my function:

function GetAge6 ( $sec, $sep = '' )
{
    if ( $sec < 60 )
        return sprintf('   %s%2us',$sep,$sec);

    $min = floor($sec/60);
    if ( $min < 60 )
        return sprintf('%2um%s%02us',$min,$sep,$sec%60);

    $hour = floor($min/60);
    if ( $hour < 48 )
        return sprintf('%2uh%s%02um',$hour,$sep,$min%60);

    $day = floor($hour/24);
    if ( $day < 28 )
        return sprintf('%2ud%s%02uh',$day,$sep,$hour%24);

    $week = floor($day/7);
    if ( $week < 52 )
        return sprintf('%2uw%s%2ud',$week,$sep,$day%7);

    $year = floor($day/365);
    if ( $year < 100 )
    {
        $week = floor( ( $day - $year*365 ) / 7 );
        return sprintf('%2u%s%s%02uw',
                $year, DCLIB_LANGUAGE=='de' ? 'j' : 'y', $sep, $week );
    }

    if ( $year < 1000000 )
        return sprintf('%s%6u%s',
                str_repeat(' ',strlen($sep)),
                $year, DCLIB_LANGUAGE=='de' ? 'j' : 'y' );

    return sprintf('***%s***',$sep);
}

And here is an example: https://wiimmfi.de/stats/login/ext#hour See column average online duration and the hover texts.

Answer 3

If you use composer (https://getcomposer.org) I recommend using the Carbon package for dates and such. Maybe you and others will find this interesting:

https://carbon.nesbot.com/docs/#api-difference

It also has difference for humans, if you would like something like: "1 hour ago".

https://carbon.nesbot.com/docs/#api-humandiff

This is also the package used by the Laravel framework and it is awesome. But if you're trying to learn new stuff, I would definitely convert all into seconds before calculating and start with the highest amount and so on.