Adding / Average Time

[aspekt9]

I need a function or something I can program to add times for running. Something like:

1) 4:21
2) 5:30
3) 4:01

Total time: 13:52

And then take the average of the total times.

As well as do something like average pace. Say each lap (400 meters) their pace is 75 seconds (1:15) And their total time was 5:00 so that would mean they're average pace was 1:15 a lap. How can I do something like this with php?

[banzaimonkey]

Quite a challenge. 😉 I don't know of any PHP functions that can be used to perform math functions with time (it's possible there are some already), so I'll do it the hard way. Here are some of the tool's we'll use:

• explode()

• intval()

• foreach()

• multi-dimensional arrays (scary!)

• count()

Here's the code (all nice and tested):

<?php
  print '<pre>';

  $times = array("4:35", "5:45", "12:53");

  //Convert the $times values to arrays, split by minutes and seconds.
  //This results in a multidimensional array (which you can see with print_r($times);)
  foreach($times as $key =>$value)
  {
    $times[$key] = explode(":", $value);
  }

  //This section will add up the times
  $tminutes = 0;
  $tseconds = 0;
  foreach($times as $value)
  {
    $tminutes += $value[0];
	$tseconds += $value[1];
  }

  //This line will find out how many minutes are in the total seconds
  //i.e. in 310 seconds there are 5 minutes.
  $minutes = intval($tseconds/60);

  //This line adds the minutes (from the previous line) to the total.
  $tminutes += $minutes;

  //This line will remove the minutes from the total seconds
  //i.e. With 310 seconds, there are 5 minutes and 10 seconds
  //So, $tseconds becomes 10
  $tseconds -= ($minutes*60);

  //At this point, we have the total time in minutes and seconds.

  //Now we want to average the times.
  //Essentially, we'll use the same process as above.
  $laps = count($times);

  $average = (($tminutes*60 + $tseconds)/$laps);

  $aminutes = 0;
  $aseconds = $average;

  $minutes = intval($average/60);

  $aminutes += $minutes;
  $aseconds -= ($minutes*60);
  $aseconds = intval($aseconds);

  //Now we have the average time in minutes and seconds.

  //This will print the total and average times in human-readable format.
  print "The total time for the run was " . $tminutes . ":" . $tseconds . '.<br />';
  print "There were $laps laps with an average of " . $aminutes . ":" . $aseconds . ' per lap.';
  print '</pre>';
?>

In case you're wondering, the <pre> tags are for debugging. Oh, and here's the output:

The total time for the run was 23:13.
There were 3 laps with an average of 7:44 per lap.

[aspekt9]

Just what I needed, works great thanks. I'm going to modify it a little bit and add support for different size tracks and the number of lacks to make it completely user-friendly.

[bradgrafelman]

Don't forget to mark this thread resolved (if it is).