Question

I want to do what StackOverflow is doing which is saying exactly how long it’s been since the last post. There is a catch though, SO displays certain information based on how long the ago the last post was – for example, if the post was less than a day ago, they post how many hours ago the last post was; if the post was less than an hour ago they post how many minutes ago it was, etc.

I’m working with a MYSQL DateTime field in the following format:

2012-09-19 13:28:45

I want to compare the above to the time NOW and so I converted that time using PHP’s strtotime function and tried comparing the two dates through a function I put together (below). Granted, this is probably the WORST possible way of doing this but after reading about PHP’s Date and DateTime functions I’m starting to become very, very confused.

function get_date_format($strToTimeString){

        $minute = 60;
        $hour = $minutes * 60;
        $day = $hour * 24;
        $week = $day * 7;
        $month = $week * 4;
        $year = $month * 12;

        $timeNow = strtotime("now");

        $timeDiff = $timeNow - $strToTimeString;

        if($timeDiff > $minute){
            if($timeDiff > $hour){
                if($timeDiff > $day){
                    if($timeDiff > $week){
                        if($timeDiff > $month){
                            if($timeDiff > $year){
                                // Years ago
                            }
                            else{
                                // Months ago
                            }
                        }
                        else{
                            // Weeks ago
                        }
                    }
                    else{
                        // Days ago
                    }
                }
                else
                {
                    // Hours ago
                }
            }
            else{
                // Minutes ago
            }

        }
        else{
            // Seconds ago
        }


    }

Is there a better way to do this? As I mentioned above, I had no luck when trying to use DateTime->diff

I really appreciate any help.

Answer 1

Use DateTime and DateTime:diff then check each value:

function returnInterval($date){
    $datetime1 = new DateTime($date);
    $datetime2 = new DateTime();
    $diff = $datetime1->diff($datetime2);
    $string = '';
    $pass = '';

    if($diff->y){
        $string .= ($diff->y == 1) ? $diff->y." year" : $diff->y." years";
        $pass = ', ';
    }
    if($diff->m){
        $string .= $pass;
        $string .= ($diff->m == 1) ? $diff->m." month" : $diff->m." months";
        $pass = ', ';
    }
    if($diff->d){
        $string .= $pass;
        $string .= ($diff->d == 1) ? $diff->d." day" : $diff->d." days";
        $pass = ', ';
    }
    if($diff->h){
        $string .= $pass;
        $string .= ($diff->h == 1) ? $diff->h." hour" : $diff->h." hours";
        $pass = ', ';
    }
    if($diff->i){
        $string .= $pass;
        $string .= ($diff->i == 1) ? $diff->i." minute" : $diff->i." minutes";
        $pass = ', ';
    }
    if($diff->s){
        $string .= $pass;
        $string .= ($diff->s == 1) ? $diff->s." second" : $diff->s." seconds";
    }
    $pos = strrpos($string, ',');
    $string = substr_replace($string, ' and ', $pos, 2);
    return $string;
}

echo returnInterval('2012-09-19 13:28:45');
// 8 days, 13 hours, 47 minutes and 44 seconds