trouble with dates

bobby_rahman

Hiya

I wondering if anyone can help me: I am trying to take a user input from a text field $data in the form of dd/mm/yyyy. I then break this down into pieces and use mktime() function to convert into a unix timestamp.

I also create the current date using $today = time(); and convert this also into unix timestamp. Once these two dates (the user input and the current date) have been calculated I want to put them into mysql database.

Now when I do the difference I seem to not get the right amount of days difference? can anyone see what is going wrong:

$estdate = "$date"; //$date is stored from user
$datepieces = explode("/",$estdate);

$month = $datepieces[1];
$day = $datepieces[0];
$year= $datepieces[2];

//validates the data inputed
$valid_date=checkdate($month,$day,$year);

$estimated_date=mktime ("","","",$month, $day, $year);

$today = time();
$difference = $today -$estimated_date1;
$diff_in_days = floor($difference / ( 365 24 60 *60));
echo "The difference in days is $diff_in_days";

bobby_rahman

Hiya after playing around with the code I realised I was a total nimrod......I added a snippet of code

Now i wonder if anyone can tell me whether these unix timestamps should be inserted into a date column in mysql table as text or varchar(32) or using the timestamp data type. Surely Now I convert the dates into timestamps in PHP there is no reason to have the column type timestamp?

So here is the snippet for any date newbies:

$estdate = "$date";
$datepieces = explode("/",$estdate);

$month = $datepieces[1];
$day = $datepieces[0];
$year= $datepieces[2];
$valid_date=checkdate($month,$day,$year);

$estimated_date=mktime ("","","",$month, $day, $year);
$today = mktime();

$difference = ceil(($estimated_date-$today) / 86400);
echo "The difference in days is $difference";

mazsolt

time() returns the current time measured in the number of seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT).
- mktime() returns the Unix timestamp corresponding to the arguments given.

When you calculate the difference, the result will be given in seconds and you must transform it.

For example, if you want to know the difference in days, you can run the following script:

$difference = $today -$estimated_date;
$arr=getdate($difference);
$dayplus=($arr['year']-1970)*365;
echo "day-difference: ",$dayplus+$arr['yday'];

You could have some problems, if the interval includes 366 days (it's a leap year).