[RESOLVED] Number of minutes etc. between two times

[Smurlos]

OK I have two timestamps.
One is the value for the current time.
The second is a time that a song was last played.

i.e.

<?
$select = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM songs ORDER BY lastplayed DESC LIMIT 1"); // returns latest played song
$songinfo = mysql_fetch_array($select);

$todaysdate = date("YmdHis");
$songlastplay=$songinfo[lastplayed];
?>

Say for example the value of $songlastplay for this particular song was "20070213005812" and the current date were "20070213012056".

How would one work out how many days, hours, minutes and seconds were between these two dates?

Thanks muchly in advance
Carl

[bradgrafelman]

Here's a function I found by searching:

function calcDateDiff($date1, $date2) {
	if( $date2 > $date1 ) {
		$tmp = $date2;
		$date2 = $date1;
		$date1 = $tmp;
	}

$diff = $date1-$date2;
$seconds = 0;
$hours   = 0;
$minutes = 0;

if($diff % 86400 <= 0)  //there are 86,400 seconds in a day
	$days = $diff / 86400;

if($diff % 86400 > 0) {
	$rest = ($diff % 86400);
	$days = ($diff - $rest) / 86400;
	if( $rest % 3600 > 0 ) {
		$rest1 = ($rest % 3600);
		$hours = ($rest - $rest1) / 3600;
		if( $rest1 % 60 > 0 ) {
			$rest2 = ($rest1 % 60);
			$minutes = ($rest1 - $rest2) / 60;
			$seconds = $rest2;
		} else
			$minutes = $rest1 / 60;
	} else
		$hours = $rest / 3600;
}
return "$days days, $hours hours, $minutes minutes, and $seconds seconds";
}

EDIT: Woops, hit submit too soon.

This function works with two Unix timestamps. To convert your database's DATETIME field into a Unix timestamp, you can use the MySQL function UNIX_TIMESTAMP(). Then, you'd use the [man]time/man function (instead of your date() call) to get the current timestamp.

Also note that doing "SELECT *" almost always wastes resources as you're selecting more columns that you actually need. Try just selecting the column(s) you're going to use.

[Smurlos]

Hey thanks.
Yeah I only have a few columns anyway and it's only on my intranet on my home computer and I always end up missing out columns if I do that so yeah, I'll leave it at that for now.