Question

I am working out the months, days, hours and minutes between two dates, I have successfully got it to work out the months, days and minutes, but I cannot for the life of get it to work out the minutes, below is my code.

<?php
    $date1 = "2012-07-01 00:00:00";
    $date2 = "2012-09-30 00:00:00";

    $diff = abs(strtotime($date2) - strtotime($date1));

    $years = floor($diff / (365*60*60*24));
    $months = floor(($diff - $years * 365*60*60*24) / (30*60*60*24));
    $days = floor(($diff - $years * 365*60*60*24 - $months*30*60*60*24)/ (60*60*24));
    $minutes = floor(($diff - $years * 365*60*60*24 - $months*30*60*60*24) / (60*60*24) / (60*60));

    printf("%d years, %d months, %d days, %d minutes\n", $years, $months, $days, $minutes);

?>

Answer 1

The best and most accurate way to approach this problem is to use the DateTime class. Otherwise you’ll run into issues when you deal with anomalies in dates (leap year, etc).

$format = 'Y-m-d h:i:s';
$tz = new DateTimeZone('America/New_York');

// Create DateTime objs based on the above format
$t1 = DateTime::createFromFormat( $format, "2012-07-01 00:00:00", $tz);
$t2 = DateTime::createFromFormat( $format, "2012-09-30 00:00:00", $tz);

// Find the difference between them
$diff = $t1->diff( $t2);

// Print out the difference in each amount
$outputs = array( 'Y' => 'Year', 'm' => 'Month', 'd' => 'day', 'h' => 'hour', 'i' => 'minute', 's' => 'seconds');

foreach( $outputs as $key => $value)
    echo $diff->format( '%'.$key) . ' ' . $value . "\n";

This outputs:

00 Year
2 Month
29 day
0 hour
0 minute
0 seconds