Question

Is there a simple straight forward way to find the remaining time between a start date – ex: 2013-01-10 12:34:55 and 5 minutes later?

What I mean is I have the start date and want to check that 5 or 60 minutes later gives a time difference of 0. Kind of a time out to be checked on server side.

Answer 1

You have 2 dates, correct ?

$date1 = strtotime('2013-01-10 12:34:33'); // converto to time
$date2 = strtotime('2013-01-10 12:45:33'); // or else it won't work
$diff = date('u', $date1) - date('u', $date2); // the difference in seconds between the two
// if you want $date2 to be now, just use date('u')
if ($diff > 3600) { // an hour later
    echo 'The difference between $date1 and $date2 is more than an hour';
}