Question

i have a timestamp problem. i would like to check a timestamp if that is in the past or future. if it is in the past, a query should happens.

up to this point i got a mysql-timestamp that will be fetched by

$row = $query->fetch_object();
$timestamp = $row->time

that contains:

2012-04-04 12:06:38

for further settings i use two more variables which will be:

$added = $timestamp + 1209600;  //what adds 14days (1209600 seconds) to my db-timestamp
$check = $added < time();  //what checks if the 14days have passed or not

okay now if i test all of these with var_dump it will return for each:

string(19) "2012-04-04 12:06:38" at var_dump($timestamp)
int(1211612) at var_dump($added)
bool(true) at var_dump($check)

so my problem is, that the following query will be executed all the time, even in case of when the 14days should have been passed. i know that because i changed the timestamp to earlier date in january. here is my query:

if ($check === true){
    $update = $db->query("UPDATE table SET xy='1' WHERE x='$x'");
    }

something seems to be wrong and i have no clue what that might be.

Answer 1

I agree with barsju. The result from MySQL is a string of the DateTime entry and not actually a timestamp. Another option that would keep it within PHP is strtotime($string); that will translate the string into its timestamp. All that matters is that you get a timestamp before your check.

I would do it on this line of your example:

$timestamp = strtotime($row->time);

I believe there are also a couple other ways to get MySQL to return the timestamp instead as well.