Question

This is arnorhs’ code, which converts a date & time into “human” timing, such as “3 days ago”:

$time = strtotime('2010-04-28 17:25:43');

echo 'event happened '.humanTiming($time).' ago';

function humanTiming ($time)
{
    $time = time() - $time; // to get the time since that moment

    $tokens = array (
        31536000 => 'year',
        2592000 => 'month',
        604800 => 'week',
        86400 => 'day',
        3600 => 'hour',
        60 => 'minute',
        1 => 'second');

    foreach ($tokens as $unit => $text) {
        if ($time < $unit) continue;
        $numberOfUnits = floor($time / $unit);
        return $numberOfUnits.' '.$text.(($numberOfUnits>1)?'s':'');
    }
}

It works great when typing the date manually.

But when I use a string which contains a MySQL database DATETIME, the result is always “42 years”:

// MySQL date is: 2012-01-02 11:22:33
$date1 = mysql_result($result,0,"date");
$date2 = date("Y:m:d H:i", strtotime($date1));
echo humanTiming($date2);
// Result: "42 years"

Edit: Here’s my second attempt

$date1 = mysql_result($result,0,"date");
$date2 = "2012-01-02 11:22:33";
echo "The first date is $date1 which is ";
echo humanTiming( strtotime($date1));
echo ", and the second date is $date2 which is ";
echo humanTiming( strtotime($date2));
// Result: The first date is 2012-01-02 11:22:33 which is , and the second date is 2012-01-02 11:22:33 which is 6 months

Answer 1

That humanTiming() function expects a UNIX timestamp, not a formatted date, so call it like this:

 $date1 = mysql_result($result,0,"date");
 echo humanTiming( strtotime($date1));

With your sample date, the output is:

6 months