php date_diff in hours

Question

How is it possible to make the code below convert days in hours?

$timestart = date_create(\'02/11/2011\' . $row->timestart); //$row->timestart returns time         


        

Answer 1

The DateInterval object, returned by date_diff stores each period of time separately, seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years.

Since the difference is 2 days, the hours property is 0, which is what you get.

Answer 2

The result of date_diff() is an object of DateInterval class. Such object has a very useful property - $days: it's total number of days between the starting and the ending dates. Besides, it stores (as its public properties) the difference in hours, minutes and seconds.

So, I suppose, what you need is just extract values of these properties from $date_diff variable, then add 24*$days to the hours number. ) All this can be wrapped into a simple function:

function hms_date_diff(DateInterval $date_diff) {
  $total_days = $date_diff->days;
  $hours      = $date_diff->h;
  if ($total_days !== FALSE) {
    $hours += 24 * $total_days;
  }
  $minutes    = $date_diff->i;
  $seconds    = $date_diff->s;
  return sprintf('%02d:%02d:%02d', $hours, $minutes, $seconds);
}

As for DateDiff::format, the doc says...

The DateInterval::format() method does not recalculate carry over points in time strings nor in date segments.