Question

I have two times in PHP and I would like to determine the elapsed hours and minutes. For instance:

8:30 to 10:00 would be 1:30

Answer 1

A solution might be to use strtotime to convert your dates/times to timestamps :

$first_str = '8:30';
$first_ts = strtotime($first_str);

$second_str = '10:00';
$second_ts = strtotime($second_str);

And, then, do the difference :

$difference_seconds = abs($second_ts - $first_ts);

And get the result in minutes or hours :

$difference_minutes = $difference_seconds / 60;
$difference_hours = $difference_minutes / 60;
var_dump($difference_minutes, $difference_hours);

You’ll get :

int 90
float 1.5

What you now have to find out is how to display that 😉

(edit after thinking a bit more)

A possibility to display the difference might be using the date function ; something like this should do :

date_default_timezone_set('UTC');

$date = date('H:i', $difference_seconds);
var_dump($date);

And I’m getting :

string '01:30' (length=5)

Note that, on my system, I had to use date_default_timezone_set to set the timezone to UTC — else, I was getting “02:30”, instead of “01:30” — probably because I’m in France, and FR is the locale of my system…