PHP compare dates [duplicate]

Answer 1

And of course date_diff has plenty of examples.

Answer 2

This will give you the number of seconds between the two dates:

<?php
$time = '2011-06-20';
$timeDiff = time() - strtotime($time);
echo $timeDiff;
?>

You could divide this value by 86,400 to get the number of days, and so on.

Answer 3

The "old" way to compare two or more dates is to convert then to an unix timestamp (seconds in float) using strtotime() function. For example:

if((strtotime('2011-05-10') - strtotime('2011-05-01')) > 604800)
{
    echo('A week has passed');
}

if((strtotime('2011-06-10') - strtotime('2011-05-01')) > 2629743)
{
    echo('A month has passed');
}

Or the "new" way is to use the DateTime class bundled with PHP 5.2 or newer. Have a look at http://php.net/manual/en/book.datetime.php.

Answer 4

How about considering using UNIX_TIMESTAMP? It uses the concept of elapsed time.

Answer 5

You need to consider what you are exactly looking for.

• Are you looking to filter dates older than a week? You can do that comparison on the SQL and you don't burden PHP with date comparisons.

• Are you wanting a date difference? Again, I suggest putting it in SQL and just display the result.

Answer 6

There is no need to put that burden on PHP when MySQL has built-in functionality for that already. You should take a look at MySQL's DATEDIFF() function:

DATEDIFF() returns expr1 – expr2 expressed as a value in days from one date to the other. expr1 and expr2 are date or date-and-time expressions. Only the date parts of the values are used in the calculation.

An example of two dates that'd give a 7-day difference could be:

mysql> select datediff('2011-06-18','2011-06-25');
+-------------------------------------+
| datediff('2011-06-18','2011-06-25') |
+-------------------------------------+
|                                  -7 | 
+-------------------------------------+

This means that the first date occured -7 days after the first date; that's 7 days before. If you let the two arguments switch place, the result would be a positive 7.