Question

I’m having problems working through how I would build times that increment by a given multiple. I would like to have a function that would take 3 params, (start, end, offset) and that would give me an output:

The following function would take a start time of 0900, a stop time of 1200 and increment by multiples of 30 minutes.

Would someone please get me started in the right direction? I thought to use to mktime for this but I couldn’t get it to work.

myfunction(9, 12, 30)

output:

9:00 am
9:30 am
10:00 am
10:30 am
11:00 am
11:30 am
12:00 am

Answer 1

Function:

function myfunction($start, $end, $step){
    $start *= 3600; // 3600 seconds per hour
    $end   *= 3600;
    $step  *= 60;   // 60 seconds per minute

    for($i = $start; $i <= $end; $i += $step)
        echo date('h:i a', $i), '<br />';   
}

Output:

09:00 am
09:30 am
10:00 am
10:30 am
11:00 am
11:30 am
12:00 pm // You put am here in desired output
         // ,but I think you really wanted pm

Codepad

strtotime is another useful function for dealing with dates and times in PHP.

The PHP Manual’s function reference is a great place to start when looking for how to do things yourself and taking advantage of built in functions. From that page if you do a search for ‘time’ you’ll find the Date/Time extension which is built in to PHP. You’ll see there are many functions available for dealing with date’s and time’s in PHP.