Question

I need some help wrapping my head around this. I am trying to develop something that does monthly, weekly, quarterly, yearly subscriptions. I need to figure out when the next charge date is. But I’m getting confused getting through the logic. I can easily calculate when a year is from the original transaction (<? echo date("Y-m-d",strtotime($charge_interval, strtotime($original_charge_time))); ?>), where $charge_interval is ‘+3 months’ or ‘+1 month’, etc. But.. if 3 months have passed, I can’t just use that equation, because it will show the “next” date as one month from the original. Any advice?

EDIT: more precision. My data is stored in a DB, and I need to ensure its getting the “next” month rather than a month from original date. Say transaction took place Nov 15th. Its now July 6th. I want “next transaction” to say July 15th, NOT Dec 15th (which is what the above code would accomplish), and to say “we have already have 7 charges before”.

Answer 1

strtotime is little-know, but can show itself to be very useful for this kind of use.

EDIT: here may be a clue:

$charges = 0;
$now = time();
$next_charge_time = strtotime($original_charge_time);
while ($next_charge_time < $now)
{
    $charges++;
    $next_charge_time = strtotime($charge_interval, $next_charge_time);
}
$next_charge_time = date("m/d/Y", $next_charge_time);
echo "You have been charged $charges times since $original_charge_time.";
echo "<br/>";
echo "Next charge will be on $next_charge_time";