Question

I’ve got 2 fields to populate: how many times the page is called per 15 minutes and per hour.

Following fields are DateTime in MySql:

$lastAccess15m=$row['lastAccess15m'];
$lastAccessHour=$row['lastAccessHour'];

And these fields are ints:

$accessPer15m=$row['accessPer15m'];
$accessPerHour=$row['accessPerHour'];

I want to compare current time with $lastAccess15, and if the time distance is larger than 15 minutes, set the value of $lastAccess15 to current time, and reset $accessPer15m, otherwise, increment $accessPer15m. The same goes for $lastAccessHour and $accessPerHour, after which those values have to be saved to mysql database.

How do I get the timespan between current time and $accessPer15m in minutes/hours?

Answer 1

PHP time():

Returns the current time measured in the number of seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT).

MySQL datetime:

The DATETIME type is used for values that contain both date and time parts. MySQL retrieves and displays DATETIME values in ‘YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS’ format. The supported range is ‘1000-01-01 00:00:00’ to ‘9999-12-31 23:59:59’.

To compare both of them, you need to convert one and them perform the comparison:

$phpDateFromMysql = strtotime( $mysqldate );

$mySqlDateFromPHP = date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $phpdate);

The easiest way is to convert the Mysql value to time() and perform the comparison:

See this working Example!

<?php

// compare if the value from $lastAccess15 is +15min in relation to the current time
$lastAccess15 = '2012-06-01 00:00:00';

$phpDateFromMysql = strtotime( $lastAccess15 );

if ($phpDateFromMysql - $lastAccess15 > 900) {
    $lastAccess15 = date('Y-m-d H:i:s', time());
}

echo $lastAccess15;
?>

Note: Inside the if statement you can perform the remaining of your operations, and even add an else clause to perform some operations if the time isn’t > 15min (like the increment you where referring to).

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Relevant reading material:

PHP strtotime function

PHP date function

PHP elseif/else if control structure