Question

I managed to do this on excel by using the following (note that I use the dd/mm/yyyy date format:)

User inputs Date assigned to cell A101/01/2007

Calculation to find out current tax year =IF(MONTH(A1)<>4,YEAR(A1)-1,IF(DAY(A1)>=6,YEAR(A1),YEAR(A1)-1)) Result is the current tax year is year 2006

That Date’s Tax year begins = =DATE(A1,4,6) result of 06/04/2006

Day before the Tax year ends = =DATE(R54+1,4,5) result of 05/04/2007

Max number of days =ABS((R55-R56))+1 result = 365 (used to detect leap years)

Number of days passed in the tax year =ABS(R53-R55-R57) result = 95

Works out percentage of tax year left =(R58/R57)*100 result is 26.02739726

Now i need to do the same in PHP, and honestly have no idea where to start.

Answer 1

I would use PHP’s DateTime class and the DateTime::diff method:

<?php
$tz = new DateTimeZone("UTC"); // Set to one of the supported time zones: http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php
$tax_year_begin_dt = new DateTime("2006-04-06", $tz);
$tax_year_end_dt = new DateTime("2007-04-06", $tz);
$num_days_in_tax_year = $tax_year_begin_dt->diff($tax_year_end_dt)->days;
echo "\$num_days_in_tax_year = $num_days_in_tax_year<br>\n";
$dt = new DateTime("2007-01-01", $tz);
$num_days_remaining = $dt->diff($tax_year_end_dt)->days;
echo "\$num_days_remaining = $num_days_remaining<br>\n";
$percent_remaining = 100.0*$num_days_remaining/$num_days_in_tax_year;
echo "$percent_remaining%<br>\n";

The output of this code is:

$num_days_in_tax_year = 365
$num_days_remaining = 95
26.027397260274%

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