frustration with dates

phence

PROBLEM 1

I have to find the current time/date and then add an X number of days to the current time/date to find a future expiration time/date.

I have been tring to work with "mktime()" & "gmmktime()", but i just can't figure out how to make it work with the current date/time. I can make it work with a made up date/time, but when i try to break up the timestamp of the current date/time everything goes down the shitter..

How can i code this to work with the current server time?

PROBLEM 2

I need to be able to subtract the current date from the expiration date to find the days, hours, minutes and seconds remaining and display the time left.

I have tried using unix timestamps with "mktime()", as well as mysql date & time functions like: date_add(), date_sub(), to_days(), from days...

nothing seems to work.

Please Help,
Sean

mrmufin

Originally posted by phence

PROBLEM 1

I have to find the current time/date and then add an X number of days to the current time/date to find a future expiration time/date.

SOLUTION 1:

Since we know that a minute has 60 seconds, an hour has 60 minutes, and there are 24 hours in a day, and the time() function returns an integer value representing the number of seconds since Jan. 1, 1970 @ 12:00AM (the start of the UNIX epoch)... we can safely conclude that:

$days = 5;
$future = time() + (86400 * $days);

will set $future as an integer value which represents the UNIX timestamp for 5 days from now.

PROBLEM 2

I need to be able to subtract the current date from the expiration date to find the days, hours, minutes and seconds remaining and display the time left.

SOLUTION 2 (one of many):

If $future is time() + (86400 $days), then we can simply subtract time() from $future and do something like this:

// Get the number of seconds:
$seconds =  $future - time();
// the number of whole days is the number of seconds / 86400:
$days = (int)($seconds / (60 * 60 * 24));
// get any remainder:
$r = (int)($seconds % (60 * 60 * 24));
if($r) {
        // the number of hours is the remainder divided by 3600:
        $hours = (int)($r / (60 * 60));
        $r = (int)($r % (60 * 60));
        if($r) {
                $minutes = (int)($r / 60);
                $secs = (int)($r % 60);
        }
}
echo "days: " . $days . "<br />";
echo "hours: " . $hours . "<br />";
echo "mins: " . $minutes . "<br />";
echo "secs: " . $secs . "<br />";

Clear as mud?