Question

I have a countdown function that (in part) returns the “time left” until a given date/time. The value is returned as a DateInterval object and is calculated using the diff method.

//calculate countdown time
$time_diff = $countdown->diff($current);

Given that $time_diff is a DateInterval object, how would I do this?

if ($time_diff > 60) {

    //do stuff

}

I know the code above doesn’t work, but how can/should I evaluate the equivalent condition (“more than 60 sec left in this DateInterval object”)?

The problem is that the script used to return the “time left” as a Unix timestamp integer, and the function is utilized in a more procedural manner by a wide array of scripts in my system.

Thank you in advance for any helpful suggestions.

Answer 1

Because it is not possible to use the format() method on a DateInterval object to get directly the total amount of remaining time in seconds, I ended up adding a helper in my function to return the “time left” as a Unix timestamp along with the DateInterval object.

//calculate unix timetamps
$current_ts = time();
$countdown_ts = $countdown->getTimestamp();
$timestamp_diff = ($current_ts < $countdown_ts) ? ($countdown_ts - $current_ts) : 0;

Hope this is useful to others.

PS. Stackoverflow is awesome.