Avoiding IF ELSE IF ELSE IF....

D_tunisia

Can anyone help please?

I'm using a UNIX time stamp to work out the difference between two dates so I am left with a result in seconds. I divide that number by 60 (to get minutes) and then 60 again (to get hours) then by 24 to get days and store these numbers in variables; I then round the result using the round() function to get a whole number.

What I am working on is taking the numbers and working out a query to give me results such as "This record was posted 2 days ago" or "This record was posted 10 minutes ago".

I have got this working using IF ELSE statements but my entire code is filled with nested IF ELSE statements.

Can anyone tell me of an easier and more efficient way to do this please?

Thanks in advance for any help.

laserlight

Why not use a function such as:

function formatTimeDiff($timediff) {
	if ($timediff >= 86400) {
		return round($timediff / 86400) . ' days';
	} elseif ($timediff >= 3600) {
		return round($timediff / 3600) . ' hours';
	} elseif ($timediff >= 60) {
		return round($timediff / 60) . ' minutes';
	} else {
		return $timediff . ' seconds';
	}
}

D_tunisia

Thanks while you were posting this I came up with this:


switch ($time_difference){

case ($time_difference == 1):
     $time_posted = $seconds;
	 $time_text = "second ago";
     break;

case ($time_difference > 1 AND $time_difference <= 59):
     $time_posted = $seconds;
	 $time_text = "seconds ago";
     break;

case ($time_difference == 60):
     $time_posted = $minutes;
	 $time_text = "minute ago";
     break;

case ($time_difference > 60 AND $time_difference <= 3599):
     $time_posted = $minutes;
	 $time_text = "minutes ago";
     break;

case ($time_difference == 3600):
     $time_posted = $hours;
	 $time_text = "hour ago";
     break;

case ($time_difference > 3600 AND $time_difference <= 215999):
     $time_posted = $hours;
	 $time_text = "hours ago";
     break;

case ($time_difference == 216000):
     $time_posted = $days;
	 $time_text = "day ago";
     break;

case ($time_difference > 216000):
     $time_posted = $days;
	 $time_text = "days ago";
     break;

default:
	echo "You should never see this, if you do something has gone wrong! The most likely problem is a that the date of this post is set in the future.";

}

Yours looks far more efficient but I'm quote proud of my attempt as well!