Question

We’ve got a time in MySQL datetime format, like:

$time = date("Y-m-d H:i:s");
$period = "+1 month";

Now we want to calculate ‘N Days‘ after this time, the thing is that I want the new calculated time also in MySQL datetime format, so I’ve created this function:

// From a date to period date based on date
function fromTime($time, $period){
    $date = DateTime::createFromFormat( 'Y-m-d H:i:s', $time);
    $date->modify($period);
    return $date->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');
}

It works fine on my localhost since I’m using PHP > 5.3, but on my real server it’s not working and I’m getting this error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined method DateTime::createFromFormat() in /home/blah/public_html/includes/functions.php on line 38

Line 38 is fromTime function.

How I need to change this function so it works also on PHP < 5.3

UPDATE: OP is looking for solution that works in < 5.2 to be precise.

Answer 1

Instead of using DateTime class, you can use the older builtin date manipulation functions like strtotime().

function fromTime($time, $period) {
    return date("Y-m-d H:i:s", strtotime($period, strtotime($time)));
}