Question

I have an excel sheet that I am importing but I would like some of the data to be converted down to minutes. Though the formats vary from 5h 5m 6.64s to 6.64s how would i be able to convert this down to only minutes in PHP? (I’m sure DateTime::createFromFormat() wont work as its range is from 0 to 59.)

Also would be converting down to minutes be an easier format to manipulate and graph within a PHP application or converting it to some time object from a PHP class better?

Keep in mind the data has to be formatted, then imported to a MySQL server then read back to a PHP application to graph for statistical purpose. I’m also using cakePHP framework to build the app. Thanks for any feedback.

Answer 1

If the different parts of the string are always separated by a space, you could simply use:

$timeParts = explode(' ', $timestring); //Separates your time string in parts
//To sum these parts into a total number of minutes:
//First make an array with all multiplication factors to go from part of string to a number of minutes
$factors = array(1/60, 1, 60, 60*24); //Last value is for days, which are probably not necessary.

//Iterate through the $timeParts array
$minutes = 0;  //Create $minutes variable, so we can add minutes to it for each string part
while($part = array_pop($timeParts)) { //Process each part of the string, starting from the end (because seconds will always be there even if minutes aren't)
    $part = floatval($part);   //I guess your numbers will technically be strings, so we need to convert them to floats (because the seconds need to be floats). Also, this function should strip off any letters appended to your numbers.
    $factor = array_shift($factors);  //Take the first part of the $factors array (because in that array the seconds are first, then minutes and so on)
    $minutes += ($part * $factor);  //Multiply the string part by its matching factor and add the result to the $minutes variable.
}

I haven’t tested this, so you’ll need to debug it yourself.