Compare Time Stamps in PHP

Question

I pull a time stamp off the database with a query, How can I compare that time stamp with the current time. I am trying to make the output say, "Updated X minutes ago".

The format of the time stamp off the server is YYYY-MM-DD HH-MM-SS (24hr system)

Thanks!

possible duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=time+ago+php — Gordon, Mar 05 '12 at 17:47
Possible duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2113940/php-compare-date — Farray, Mar 05 '12 at 17:48
possible duplicate of [X Time Ago in PHP](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8580278/x-time-ago-in-php) — George Cummins, Mar 05 '12 at 17:51

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 05 '12 at 17:46

You can convert most dates (including those sourced from MySQL) with strtotime() into a unix timestamp (a count of the seconds since Jan 1st 1970)

So you could do

$then = $your_date_from_mysql;
$now = time();
$time_ago = $now - strtotime($then); //gets time ago in seconds
$minutes = $time_ago / 60; //you could call floor() on this to round it down - or ceil() to round up
echo "Updated {$minutes} minutes ago";

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 05 '12 at 17:46

1

Assuming you're using MySQL:

SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(now()) - UNIX_TIMESTAMP(timestampfield) AS seconds

and then

echo "Updated ", ceil($seconds / 60), " seconds ago";

It's better to have the database do the computing - it's already got the timestamp in an internal format that's easily amenable to these sorts of calculations. Selecting out a formatted string, then converting the string back to a time value, etc... is just a waste of computing time.

answered Mar 05 '12 at 17:46

Marc B

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Thanks, make one edit to you second part of code, should be minutes not seconds. – socbrian Mar 05 '12 at 18:01
That's what the `/ 60` part is - take the seconds that mysql returns and convert to minutes. – Marc B Mar 05 '12 at 18:06

Compare Time Stamps in PHP

2 Answers2