convert time range to seconds

tripwater

Sorry, I did search this forum but I guess I did not use the correct terms because I could not find a post on this. (I am sure there is)

What I need is to know how to take a time of 10:00 pm to 12:00 am and get the difference in seconds.

I want to pass in the hour, min and meridiem of a From and To time and get back a difference in seconds between two times, even if one of the times goes into the next day like above.

Sorry again if this has been answered somewhere else.

Thank you for any help.

tripwater

OK, I did find out how to convert the string to a timestamp using strtotime()

I hope this is what I need. I was thinking more of subtracting the two times in seconds...

I then took my from timestamp and subtracted my to;

So how do I now take this total and convert it to hours and minutes?

First off, by converting these two times to timestamps does this give me an accurate number of seconds?

I need to have a result that if I pass in 10:00 pm to 12:30 am I end up with 2 hours and 30 mins

So by me taking the two timestamps and subtracting them from one another, then converting to hours and minutes...will this give me the desired result?

If so, how do I take this result and figure out how many hours and left over minutes there are?

Ultimately what I have is something that will eventually be multiplied by the number of days. SO if they enter 9:00 am to 5:00 pm it yields 8 hours but if they say it is this way over 5 days (date range) I need it to say 40 hours instead.

I am thinking I can take the timestamp difference and multiply it by the number of days in the date range then convert it to hours and minutes.

If a timestamp will not do this for me, can I do this in seconds? And How?

thank you again

dcav

By using date() function, you can convert timestamps back to a 'readable' format.

$readable = date ("H:i:s", $yourUnixTime);

jkurrle

A timestamp is one of PHP's ways of logging time. A timestamp basically counts the number of seconds since 12am on Jan 1st, 1970. So, yes, subtracting one value from the next would give you the total seconds.

As for computing days, hours, minutes, etc. simply use the floor() function combined with the modulus (%) operand to compute out what you need.

tripwater

THanks for the replies,

dcav,

I have this

//9:00 AM
$from 	= strtotime("".$HTTP_POST_VARS["fromhour"].":".$HTTP_POST_VARS["frommin"]." ".$HTTP_POST_VARS["frommerid"]."");

//5:00 PM
$to 	= strtotime("".$HTTP_POST_VARS["tohour"].":".$HTTP_POST_VARS["tomin"]." ".$HTTP_POST_VARS["tomerid"]."");


$totalsec	=  $from - $to;


$readable = date ("H:i:s", $totalsec);

echo $readable;

So if I select 9:00 am to 5:00 pm (which should be 8 hours) what I have now echoes 11:00:00

Not sure on this solution.

jkurrle,

I have never used floor() before. I know about the % operand but not sure how to take a timestamp and convert it to hours and leftover minutes using floor() and %. Can you please walk me through a working example if you have the time? If not I understand. I looked up the floor() in my php book and it looks like to rounds the figure down to an int but I am already working with an int so I am confused.

thank you again

jkurrle

sample code:

$total_seconds=$timestamp_2-$timestamp_1;
$seconds=$total_seconds%60;

$total_minutes=floor($total_seconds/60);
$minutes=$total_minutes%60;

$total_hours=floor($total_minutes/60);
$hours=$total_hours%24;

$days=floor($total_hours/24);

echo "Elapsed time is $days days, $hours hours, $minutes minutes, $seconds seconds.";