Question

I’ve been thrown in at the deep end at work, I grew up knowing plain HTML (mid-90’s) and I’ve been asked to alter a form at work that’s in PHP, I can alter PHP code written by others, but there’s no way I could write it myself. I’ve altered this form to just about how I want it, but there’s 1 bit I want to alter, if anyone can help it would be greatly appreciated…

been on this for 2 days searching the web and trying stuff, I have the following

 <p class="quest">Date from: <input type="text" name="acc2" class="tcal" value="" /> to: <input type="text" name="acc3" class="tcal" value="" />

it uses javascript to pop up a calendar (tigra calendar) that then returns 2 dates (acc2 and acc3), the dates are in d/m/Y (DD/MM/YYYY) format (standard here in Europe/Aus/NZ).
What I’m wanting to do is get it to check if the difference is greater than 42 days (6 weeks), if it is I want it to display some text with a link (42 days or less is fine).
If I put on the page as a test:

<?php echo($acc3); ?>

then it displays 1341442800 on the page (before a date is chosen), if the user selects a date then the above number stays (not dynamic)

Is what I’m wanting possible?
If not, can it be checked on submission and pop up an alert (without the link)?
I currently use Javascript to check the form, an example is:

<script language="javascript" type="text/Javascript">
    <!--
        function collect()  {
            if(document.all.ct.value == "TempAcc")
            {
                if(document.all.acc7.value.length <11)
                {
                    alert("You need to fill in your contact number with your FULL number including STD code.");
                    return false;
                }
            }
        }//end function collect
    //-->
    </script>

any help with this would be very much appreciated, please try to be specific with any code as I’m am still very much a beginner.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

That works for me: Live demo on fiddle.net

// parse dates from DD/MM/YYYY to YYYY/MM/DD
var oldBegin = parseDate("03/06/2012");
var oldEnd = parseDate("07/06/2012");

// calculate difference and format to days
var diff = Math.round((oldEnd - oldBegin)/1000/60/60/24);
alert(diff);


function parseDate(str) {
  var m = str.match(/^(\d{1,2})\/(\d{1,2})\/(\d{4})$/);
  return (m) ? new Date(m[3], m[2]-1, m[1]) : null;
}

Edit:
Include jQuery to your webpage. It will help you with the javascript part.
Give both of your input-fields a unique id (like id=”date1″ and id=”date2″) and then get the values in javascript

$('date1').val();
$('date2').val();

The whole code should look something like that:

<script type="text/javascript">
//The code will trigger when the user leaves the second input field
$("#date2").focusout(function() {
    // parse dates from DD/MM/YYYY to YYYY/MM/DD
    var date1 = parseDate($('date1').val());
    var date2 = parseDate($('date2').val());

    // calculate difference and format to days
    var diff = Math.round((date2 - date1)/1000/60/60/24);
    alert(diff);


    function parseDate(str) {
      var m = str.match(/^(\d{1,2})\/(\d{1,2})\/(\d{4})$/);
      return (m) ? new Date(m[3], m[2]-1, m[1]) : null;
    }
});
</script>

You can now add some if-statements to check if one input is empty.