Question

I need a method that gets two strings that represents a DateTime (in the MySql syntax) and returns the time difference between them.
Then I need to compare that time to 3 seconds so I could block a Brute Force attack on my server.

I’ve messed a lot with Google and I managed to get the string representation of the DateTime object, but I can’t manage to convert and compare them.

Answer 1

$time_str1 = '2011-09-10 19:59:23'; // first string datetime from DB
$time_str2 = '2011-09-10 19:59:24'; // second string datetime from DB

// first DateTime object created based on the MySQL datetime format
$dt1 = DateTime::createFromFormat('Y-m-d H:i:s', $time_str1);

// second DateTime object created based on the MySQL datetime format
$dt2 = DateTime::createFromFormat('Y-m-d H:i:s', $time_str2);

// difference comparison to check if at least 3 seconds have passed
if ( ($dt2->format('U') - $dt1->format('U')) > 3) {
    echo 'Ok, no brute force'; // yes, three seconds have passed
} else{
    echo 'We got you newbie'; // nope, three second haven't passed
}