Question

I’m trying to make an events page and I want to create 2 datetime variables. They would take the current time, and create one variable at 06:00 am, and one at 05:59 am.

The issue I’m having though is with the calculations.

If a person is visiting the page on March 17, 11PM – then var1 would be March 17 06:00AM, and var 2 March 18 05:59AM.

However if a person is viewing the page on March 18 01:00 AM, then var 1 would still be March 17 06:00AM, the same goes for var2.

How would I take the below $date variable, and do the calculations for the other 2 variables?

date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');
$date = date('Y-m-d H:i:s', time());

Answer 1

You can simply query the current hour to see if it’s less than 6; if it is, then the start of the current logical day (based on your rules) was yesterday, 6am; otherwise it was today, 6am. Given this, strtotime can trivially get you the “start” time and adding a day to that gives you the “end” time.

date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');
$currentHour = date('H');
if ($currentHour < 6) {
    // logical day started yesterday
    $start = strtotime('yesterday 06:00');
    $end = strtotime('today 05:59:59');
}
else {
    // logical day started today
    $start = strtotime('today 06:00');
    $end = strtotime('tomorrow 05:59:59');
}

echo "The current logical day started on ".date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $start);
echo " and it ends on ".date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $end);