Question

I’m trying to compare two dates in PHP and figure out how many days apart the dates are. I am grabbing the first date from a MySQL database and the second date is the current date. The date in the MySQL database looks like this “2010-01-21 15:21:46”

$date1 = date("Y-m-d", $product['hold_date'])
$date2 = date("Y-m-d");

How can I compare these two dates and simply return the amount of days?

EDIT ———————————————————————————

This works:

$date1 = date(strtotime('2009-12-25 15:21:46'));
$date2 = time();

$secondsDifference = $date2 - $date1;
$days = floor($secondsDifference / 86400);

echo $days;

Answer 1

$secondsDifference = $date2 - $date1;

This is the seconds between date2 and date 1. You may need to reorder depending upon which one is more recent/futher in the future. This is of course if you want a positive number.

Or you can use:

$secondsDifference = abs($date2 - $date1);

You can do simple arithmetic to find out the number of days

define("SECONDS_IN_DAY", 60*60*24);
$days = floor($secondsDifference / SECONDS_IN_DAY); // rounds down
// you can use ceil() to round it up.

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In order to get the MySQL date into a seconds format, use strtotime()

$time = strtotime($mysql_time);

So do this:

$date1 = strtotime($product['hold_date']);
$date2 = time();