Question

I need to add days to given string date and display calculated date in string

This is what I have tried, but I could not make it work.

$date = date_create('1-Feb-2012');
$newDate = date_modify($date, '+2 day');
echo 'Your date is' . $newDate . '.';

This gives an error

Object of class DateTime could not be converted to string

Answer 1

You need to tell the DateTime object how to format its output using DateTime::format. So, for example:

$date = new DateTime('1-Feb-2012');
$date->modify('+2 day');
echo 'Your date is' . $newDate->format('Y-m-d H:i:s') . '.';

Also note that modify directly modifies the DateTime – it doesn’t just return a new one, as the documentation might lead you to believe – so I’ve removed the second variable. I’ve taken the liberty of changing the objects to the object-oriented form as well, which you should be using 🙂

Here’s a working demo.