Question

How can I identify the time passed after an user updated his account in my MySQL database? I have a timestamp in my MySQL table (to store user update time) so now how can I identify the time passed from last user update, using PHP?

As example:

User last update time: 2012-04-08 00:20:00;

Now: 2012-04-08 00:40:00;

Time passed since last update: 20 (minutes) ← I need this using PHP

Answer 1

If you have the data on

$last_update_time = '2012-04-08 00:20:00';
$now = time(); //this gets you the seconds since epoch

you can do

$last_update_since_epoch = strtotime($last_update_time); //this converts the string to the seconds since epoch

aand… now, since you have seconds on both variables

$seconds_passed = $now - $last_update_since_epoch;

now, you can do $seconds_passed / 60 to get the minutes passed since the last update.

Hope this helps 😉