Question

I have a cronjob, that kicks in every 5 minutes. It should do some tasks only at specific times of the day (e.g. morning and evening).

What’s php’s most effective / elegant way to determine if the DateTime of now is in between the 5 minute time frame in that the cronjob may kick in?

At the moment I’m doing:

$date = new DateTime();

$hour = (int)$date->format('H');
$min = (int)$date->format('i');

if($hour == 7 && ($min >= 40 || $min < 45)) {
    // Do something in the morning
}

if($hour == 21 && ($min >= 00 && $min < 05)) {
    // Do something in the evening
}

But this seems like a lot of code. Ain’t there something like

$date->isInTimeRane($begin, $end);

as native php code?

Answer 1

You can extend DateTime to add your own methods to it. I would do it this way:-

class MyDateTime extends DateTime
{
    /**
    * Checks if this DateTime is between two others
    * @param DateTime $start
    * @param DateTime $end
    * @return boolean 
    */
    public function inRange(DateTime $start, DateTime $end){
        return ($this >= $start && $this <= $end);
    }
}

Then you can simply do:-

$begin = new DateTime($sometime);
$end = new DateTime($someLaterTime);
$myTime = new MyDateTime($yetAnotherTime);
var_dump($myTime->inRange($begin, $end);

That is the cleanest way I can think of of doing it and pretty much what you asked for.