Question

I have a function that is accepting the date and time, and number of occurrences of an episode. I’m using a while loop to try and insert and episode every week on the same day and time. For example if the episode is monday at 7PM, i want to insert in for every monday at 7PM for the number of occurrences given.

Here’s my code and while loop:

$sEpsAirDate =  strtotime($aVars['air_date'].' '.$aVars['air_time'].$aVars['air_ampm']);

            $i = 1;
            while ($i <= $aVars['repeat_count']) {

                $sEpsAirDate =  // How can I alter this variable to change the date to every week?                      

                db_res(
                    "INSERT INTO `hm_episodes_main` SET 
                        `show_id` = '{$aVars['show_id']}',
                        `title` = '{$sEpsTitle}.{$i}',
                        `season` = '{$aVars['eps_season']}',
                        `uri` = '{$sUri}.{$i}',
                        `desc` = '{$sEpsDesc}',
                        `air_date` = '{$sEpsAirDate}'
                ");

                $i++ 
            }

How would I alter the $sEpsAirDate variable to be entered accurately on every day of the week on the given time?

Answer 1

Use mktime():

$next_ep_timestamp = mktime ($hour,$min,$sec, $first_ep_month, $first_ep_day + 7 * $weekcount, $first_ep_year);

“Init” this by setting the respective variables for the date, month and year of the first episode, then you can create new dates for following weeks by adding increments of 7 to the day-parameter in mktime (like shown above).

Then format for output to SQL like this:

$datetime_str = date("Y-m-d H:i:s", $next_ep_timestamp);
//gives a date-str like '2011-10-16 12:59:01'