String to Timestamp ?help?

[phence]

How can i take a date and time such as '2003-01-01 9:00:00' and turn that date and time into a timestamp?

My problem is, I have a database full of data, each result has a date and time at which that result Expires.

I need to be able to display the time left of each result in the database.

I can't seem to turn the time and date into a timestamp.

the reason i need the date and time made into a timestamp is so that i can break the time left down into days, hours, minutes and seconds.

I have tried the following, but i just end up with 1969-12-31 00:00:00.

// overdue timestamp 
$otstamp = strtotime('Y-m-d', $overdue_time);

I would greatly appreciate any help!
thank-you

[diego25]

Read about the documentation of strtotime to see what arguments it takes.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php

Diego

[phence]

😕
i've already looked there for help. I can't pull anything from there to help..

does anyone know of a solution?

[nnichols]

Use the power of your db engine. If you are using MySQL use the "DATE_FORMAT()" function.

Hope this helps 😉

[nnichols]

Scrub what I said in my previous post and try this -

SELECT SEC_TO_TIME(UNIX_TIMESTAMP(expire) - UNIX_TIMESTAMP()) AS remains FROM results

It will give you the number of hours:mins:secs until it expires. Then you can write a simple function in PHP to format the hours into days and hours.

Hope this helps 😉

[phence]

thats not what im asking...

I need to take a date/time written like this ''1969-12-31 06:55:10" and change it into a timestamp. So that I CAN break it up into days, hours, minutes, and seconds!

For those wondering...

This is what i use to breakup timestamps into d,h,m,s

// $stamp = Timestamp you plan to break apart
// Get the number of seconds:
$seconds =  $stamp - 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);
    } 
}

// prepare time left for display
$time_left = date(d, $days) . " days " . date(h, $hours) . " hours " . date(i, $minutes) . " mins " . date(s, $secs) . " secs";

[Weedpacket]

Is 1969-12-31 an accurate date? I ask 'cos Unix-style timestamps don't reach back that far, and you'll need to use some other method than a timestamp calculation. I take it that you want to calculate the number days, hours, minutes and seconds ago that a particular date was?

[phence]

I have results in a database, and in each result there are two dates.
1) the date which the data was submited.

2) the date which the data expires.
* Dates are in this format 2003-01-01 (Year-Month-Day)

What needs to be displayed is the time left until the data expires.

So i figured i needed to take the date from the database, and then subtract it from the current time to find the remaining time!

** and yes '1969-12-31' is the output i receive when using the following code.

// overdue time var
$overdue_time = $data['exp-date'];

// expired date timestamp 
$otstamp = strtotime('Y-m-d', $overdue_time);

// Get the number of seconds:
$seconds =  $otstamp - 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);
    } 
}

// prepare time left for display
$time_left = date(d, $days) . " days " . date(h, $hours) . " hours " . date(i, $minutes) . " mins " . date(s, $secs) . " secs";

echo $time_left;

[nnichols]

Your original example will work fine if you leave out that string at the beginning (and it must be a valid unix timestamp)-

// overdue timestamp 
$otstamp = strtotime($overdue_time);

I still don't quite understand why you don't use my example and get the database to return the amount of time to expiry

[phence]

nnichols,
When you say:

SELECT SEC_TO_TIME(UNIX_TIMESTAMP(expire) - UNIX_TIMESTAMP()) AS remains FROM results

is 'expire' refering to the variable that is holding the formated date (in this case $overdue_time)???

[nnichols]

no it is referring to your table column containing the date/timestamp of expiry

[phence]

the column does not contain a timestamp, it contains a string.
In the format of 2003-01-01 (Y-m-d).

A Timestamp is what i need to make! from the string inside the expire column.

[nnichols]

what is the column type? - CHAR? VARCHAR? DATE?

It should work with any as long as that is the format that you have used. Give it a try.