date insertion.

roel

Does anybody know the process of having the date and time known so I can use it in a calculation?

Thanxs in advance.

Roel

the_Igel

time().
or date().

roel

I'm sorry for not being so clear. What i meant was that I should have the time and date following the actual time and date. The idea is to calculate how many months it has been since a date entered.

P.S.

If the two functions will work could you explain me how they should

Thanx in advance

Weedpacket

Originally posted by roel
If the two functions will work could you explain me how they should.

They would, but I won't explain how (because in my signature I already say what I would have said).

the_Igel

Originally posted by roel
The idea is to calculate how many months it has been since a date entered.

let's assume $time is timestamp.
Then $months_passed = (date('Y') - date('Y', $time))*12 + date('m') - date('m', $time);

if $time is like '2002:09:30', then month & year can be retrieved as substrings.

But I have a strong feeling I still don't understand your question 🙂

roel

I'll explain what it is I want to do.

I want to be able to calculate the amount of months that have been passed since a date (the curent date that will change automatically once a day has passed) that can be submitted.

lets asume i've got an input box that gives a date
like 01-12-1996. (or three selct boxes if thats easier)

Together with the curent date (maybe from server, but my server is not in the same time area as I am)

i could calculate:

$months_passed = (date('Y') - date('Y', $time))*12 + date('m') - date('m', $time);

But how does a time stamp work....

I hope you understand what i've just said

Thanx in advance

Roel...

Weedpacket

A timestamp in this context is the number of seconds that have elapsed since the start of January 1, 1970 (an instant known as the "epoch"). Since it's just a number and not a more complicated date/time structure, it's easy to calculate intervals with it.

It's returned by the time() and mktime() functions. Greenwich Mean versions are available as gmtime() and gmmktime().

the_Igel

There are two common ways to work with dates and time.
First is timestamp, or, more precisely, UNIX timestamp. Yes, it's the number of seconds since 01/01/1970. It's a big number, still no problem to work with it. One month is roughly 30243600.
If you have two timestamps, then number of month passed since one till other can be calculated as $stamp1 - $stamp2/(30243600). Timestamps can be obtained with time() and mktime() functions.

Other way is strings like "01-12-1996". You may obtain year and month as substrings, and then add & substract them in any way.
date() function is useful to convert from timestamp to formatted string, for example, to obtain year or month from timestamp, as I wrote.