Question

I need to generate a string of incrementing dates, something like this:

(year, month, day, hour, minute)
2010, 2, 12, 11, 30
2010, 2, 12, 11, 31
etc

What would be the best way of doing this? I may want to generate up to 1000 lines like this

Answer 1

You can use the date classes (note: DateInterval and DatePeriod are only available as of PHP 5.3) to make life easy.

$start    = new DateTime('2010-02-12 11:30', new DateTimeZone('UTC'));
$interval = new DateInterval('PT1M'); // 1 minute interval
$period   = new DatePeriod($start, $interval, 100); // Run 100 times

foreach ($period as $datetime) {
    // Output like: 2009, 02, 12, 11, 30
    echo $datetime->format("Y, m, d, H, i") . PHP_EOL;
}

For a less pretty, but available in older versions of PHP, alternative then see the other suggestions recommending mktime.