Question

I am trying to compare the current datetime, with a datetime from the database using string, as the following:

$today = new DateTime("now");
$todayString = $today->format('Y-m-d H:i:s'); 

if($todayString >= $rows["PrioritizationDueDate"])
{...}

$todayString keeps giving me the time 7 hours earlier (i.e now its 11:03pm, its giving me 16:04).

More, is it better to compare this way, or should i compare using datetime objects?

Answer 1

Set a correct timezone in the constructor to DateTime.

$today = new DateTime("now", new DateTimeZone('TimezoneString'));

Where TimezoneString is a valid timezone string.

Edit: For a more complete example using DateTime objects, I would use DateTime::diff in conjunction with DateTime::createFromFormat.

$rows["PrioritizationDueDate"] = '2011-11-20 10:30:00';

$today = new DateTime("now", new DateTimeZone('America/New_York'));
$row_date = DateTime::createFromFormat( 'Y-m-d H:i:s', $rows["PrioritizationDueDate"], new DateTimeZone('America/New_York'));

if( $row_date->diff( $today)->format('%a') > 1)
{
    echo 'The row timestamp is more than one day in the past from now.';
}

Demo