Question

I am building a search script that will filter results based on ages:

• Posts are people on my site.
• The age is entered as a date of birth in a custom field.

I am confident I can write a function to convert this date of birth to an age, then add it again as another custom field.

My only worry is, what happens each year when they get older? I am not too sure what to do. I could have a script that runs each day…but this feels like a cheat.

Answer 1

I’ve got a site where there is:

echo "If Joe was alive, he would be" . get_age( "1948-06-18" ) . "years old";

And in the theme’s functions.php this:

// Calculate the age from a given birth date
// Example: get_age("YEAR-MONTH-DAY");
function get_age( $birth_date )
{
    // Explode the date into meaningful variables
    list( $year, $month, $day) = explode( "-", $birth_date );

    // Find the differences
    $y_diff = date( "Y" ) - $year;
    $m_diff = date( "m" ) - $month;
    $d_diff = date( "d" ) - $day;

    // If the day has not occured this year
    if ( $d_diff < 0 || $m_diff < 0 )
      $y_diff --;

    return $y_diff;
}