Question

I am trying to loop through dates with PHP. Currently my code gets stuck in a loop repeating 110307. I need the date format to be in yymmdd. Here is what I was trying to use:

<?php
    $check_date = '100227';
    $end_date = '100324';

    while($check_date != $end_date){
        $check_date = date("ymd", strtotime("+1 day", strtotime($check_date)));
        echo $check_date . '<br>';  
    }
?>

Answer 1

strtotime interprets “100227” as the time 10:02:27 today, not 2010-02-27. So after the first step, $check_date (today) is “110307”. At all subsequent steps “110307” is again interpreted as a time today, giving $check_date as “110307” again.

A neat trick for iterating dates is to take advantage of mktime’s ability to normalize dates, something like this:

$date_arr = array(27,2,2010);
$end_date = "100324";
do {
    $check_date = gmdate('ymd', gmmktime(0,0,0,$date_arr[1],$date_arr[0]++,$date_arr[2]));
    echo $check_date."\n";
} while($end_date!=$check_date);