Question

I have a function that will check to see if someones status is a certain value and if it is and after a year of it, that persons status will be updated.

Here is the code

if (strtotime($csvstatuschange) < strtotime("-365 day") && (
        $csvstatus == "Non-Active, Unable to Monitor - Incidental Business use Exclusion" ||
        $csvstatus == "Non-Active - Insurance Cancelled" ||
        $csvstatus == "Non-Active - Employee Not Covered Under Listed Policy" ||
        $csvstatus == "Non-Active - No Longer Employed" ||
        $csvstatus == "Non-Active - Other"
)) {
    $status = "Archived";
    $wsth = $DBH->prepare("
        UPDATE csvdata 
        SET status = :status, 
            statuschangedate = :date 
        WHERE username = :username
    ");
    $wsth->execute(array(
        ':status' => $status, 
        ':username' => $csvusername, 
        ':date' => $date
    ));
}

So my issue is – for instance if the persons status is Non-Active - Insurance Cancelled and it was changed today. There status still gets changed.

Thank you for your time!

Answer 1

It seems most likely that $csvstatuschange is in a format that strtotime can’t make sense of. As a result it’s returning false, which is cast to integer 0. 0 will always be less than 1 year ago.

Make sure that the format is one that can be read by strtotime. My preference is Y-m-d H:i:s since it’s unambiguous. A format like d/m/Y can be ambiguous because m/d/Y is also frequently used (is 3/4/95 the fourth of March or the third of April?)