"Time left until 6.00pm friday"

cameronx

Evening All

I have an intriguing problem involving date calculation. For the record, i have no problem building OO php, but for some reason this tiny function is sending me round in circles.

The basic premise is to calculate the time left until friday 6pm in days, hours, mins and seconds when the user loads a page (i.e. how long is left until the weekend). This should be done by getting the current time from the server, and comparing it to a generated timestamp for the nearest friday. For example, if the page is loaded on wednesday at 1pm, the function needs to find out when the next friday is and build a timestamp for 6pm on that date. The two dates then need to be compared/subtracted to or from one another and formatted appropriately.

I want to evolve it to then detect if the page is loaded on the weekend and calculate the time left to the end (11.59pm sunday).

The idea afterwards (i've already built this) is to take the resulting string and pump out a dynamic PNG graphic which is included in the header of every page on a site as a countdown.

Can anyone shed any light on this or help me?

Cheers

Alex

Weedpacket

Perhaps strtotime('6 pm next Friday') will work (maybe not - what does it do on Friday? After 6pm?) Subtract from that figure the current time and you'll have the number of seconds until 6pm next Friday.

cameronx

I certainly will have a look at that in the morning and reportback if it works😉 I'm initially sceptical of using plain english to do my calculations though...(god what would make anyone say that???)

The way i have been doing it so far (possibly naively) is to take the numeric day of the week (0-6, assuming it isn't 6 or 0 for simplicity) and subtract it from 5 (friday). Then either calculating the date or using or mktime() by getting the current time and adding the difference in the days.

The confusion i have is not knowing which way to generate the dates/stamps so that it will be easiest to format them ( i.e.unix timestamps with mktime, or simple dates with date() ).

Got a good reference on interational date formatting and the english that can accepted as input from the manual:
http://www.gnu.org/manual/tar-1.12/html_chapter/tar_7.html