Question

How can I calculate time duration considering the datestamp in PHP? the date format I used in between dates is “Y-m-d H:i:s”,

My working code can only compute the duration between time without considering the date.

below is my code:

$assigned_time = "2012-05-21 22:02:00";
$completed_time= "2012-05-22 05:02:00";   

function hmsDiff ($assigned_time, $completed_time) {
    $assigned_seconds = hmsToSeconds($assigned_time);
    $completed_seconds = hmsToSeconds($completed_time);

    $remaining_seconds = $assigned_seconds - $completed_seconds;

    return secondsToHMS($remaining_seconds);
}
function hmsToSeconds ($hms) {
    $total_seconds = 0;
    list($hours, $minutes, $seconds) = explode(":", $hms);
    $total_seconds += $hours * 60 * 60;
    $total_seconds += $minutes * 60;
    $total_seconds += $seconds;

    return $total_seconds;
}

 function secondsToHMS ($seconds) {
    $minutes = (int)($seconds / 60); 
    $seconds = $seconds % 60;
    $hours = (int)($minutes / 60); 
    $minutes = $minutes % 60;

    return  sprintf("%02d", abs($hours)) . ":" . 
        sprintf("%02d", abs($minutes)) . ":" . 
        sprintf("%02d", abs($seconds));

 }

Answer 1

The DateTime has a “diff” method which returns an Interval object. The interval object has a method “format” which allows you to customize the output.

#!/usr/bin/env php
<?php

$assigned_time = "2012-05-21 22:02:00";
$completed_time= "2012-05-22 05:02:00";   

$d1 = new DateTime($assigned_time);
$d2 = new DateTime($completed_time);
$interval = $d2->diff($d1);

echo $interval->format('%d days, %H hours, %I minutes, %S seconds');

NOTE: If you are not using 5.3.0+, there is a good answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/676828/128346.