How to get time difference in minutes in PHP

Question

How to calculate minute difference between two date-times in PHP?

Answer 1

My solution to find the difference between two dates is here. With this function you can find differences like seconds, minutes, hours, days, years and months.

function alihan_diff_dates($date = null, $diff = "minutes") {
 $start_date = new DateTime($date);
 $since_start = $start_date->diff(new DateTime( date('Y-m-d H:i:s') )); // date now
 print_r($since_start);
 switch ($diff) {
    case 'seconds':
        return $since_start->s;
        break;
    case 'minutes':
        return $since_start->i;
        break;
    case 'hours':
        return $since_start->h;
        break;
    case 'days':
        return $since_start->d;
        break;      
    default:
        # code...
        break;
 }
}

You can develop this function. I tested and works for me. DateInterval object output is here:

/*
DateInterval Object ( [y] => 0 [m] => 0 [d] => 0 [h] => 0 [i] => 5 [s] => 13 [f] => 0 [weekday] => 0 [weekday_behavior] => 0 [first_last_day_of] => 0 [invert] => 0 [days] => 0 [special_type] => 0 [special_amount] => 0 [have_weekday_relative] => 0 [have_special_relative] => 0 ) 
*/

Function Usage:

$date = the past date, $diff = type eg: "minutes", "days", "seconds"

$diff_mins = alihan_diff_dates("2019-03-24 13:24:19", "minutes");

Good Luck.