Print years, days, hour, minutes, seconds since a Date

[luiddog]

I'm using the following code. What I'm trying to do is to create a print out like "22 Years, 25 Days, 43 Minutes, 37 Seconds." Which is the time since $time_in. The code is getting back a number but it isn't formatted. Also, the date is not coming from a DB. Any ideas? Thanks.

<?
$time_in = '1918-10-21 06:30:00';
$time_out = date("Y-m-d H:i:s");

$sincetime = $time_out - $time_in;
?>

[bubblenut]

Well I find timstamps easiest to use so this is how I'd do it.

$time_in = '1918-10-21 06:30:00';
//extract the parts of the time into the $matches or exit
if(!preg_match('/^([0-9]{4})-([0-9]{2})-([0-9]{2})\s([0-9]{2}):([0-9]{2}):([0-9]{2})$', $matches)) {
  exit('Invalid time in '.$time_in);
}
//make them into a timestamp
$timestamp_in=mktime($matches[4],$matches[5], $matches[6], $matches[2], $matches[3], $matches[1]);

//get the current timestamp
$timestamp_out=time();

//is $time_in in the future or the past? then find the difference
if($timestamp_in>$timetamp_out) {
  $future=true;
  $difference=$timestamp_in-$timestamp_out;
} else {
  $future=false;
  $difference=$timestamp_out-$timestamp_in;
}

//work out how many of each time unit there are
$seconds = $difference%60;
$difference = intval($difference/60);
$minutes = $difference%60;
$difference = intval($difference/60);
$hours = $difference%24;
$difference = intval($difference/24);
$days = $difference%365; //sod them pesky leap years
$years = intval($difference/365);

I haven't testde this so there may be a couple of errors.

HTH
Bubble

[luiddog]

Hey thanks that's a better way to go about it. But I'm getting an error on line 5. This is what's on my line 5.

if(!preg_match('/^{([0-9]{4})-([0-9]{2})-([0-9]{2})s([0-9]{2})<img} src="images/smilies/frown.gif" border="0" alt="">[0-9]{2})<img src="images/smilies/frown.gif" border="0" alt="">[0-9]{2})$', $matches)) {

This is the error on the page:

Warning: Unknown modifier 'l' in /////~~.php on line 5
Invalid time in 1918-10-21 06:30:00

Any ideas? Thanks again!

[drew010]

instead of using that regular expression and using mktime, it would be much easier and much more flexible to just use strtotime.

the top part of the new code would be this:

$time_in = '1918-10-21 06:30:00';

$timestamp_in = strtotime($time_in);
$timestamp_out = time(); 

[luiddog]

Thanks again for your help. So the code begins:

$time_in = '1918-10-21 06:30:00';

$timestamp_in = strtotime($time_in);
$timestamp_out = time();

//is $time_in in the future or the past? then find the difference
if($timestamp_in>$timetamp_out) {

etc.

But when I echo $years or $days everything comes out as -34. Weird.

[bubblenut]

Argg, damned BB screwing up my code. Anyway luiddog's strtotime way's a better way of getting a timestamp.