Creating and comparing dates

[meigwil]

Hi,

I'm building a booking system for a client who rents out holiday cottages.

I'm stuck on this, rather central, point.

I retrieve a record set from the DB, getting the arrival date, departure date and the number of nights (I thought I'd keep it in there for simplicity). So the test data (essentially) returns these records:

2008-03-30 | 2008-04-05 | 6
2008-04-13 | 2008-04-20 | 7
2008-04-27 | 2008-05-01 | 4

What I'd like to get from this record set (which spans the current month, April) is either a range of unavailable dates (2008-03-30, 2008-03-31, 2008-04-01 etc) or perhaps an array like this

$dates = (30 = > booked, 31 => booked, 01 => booked, 02 => booked, 03 => booked, 04 => booked, 05 => free, 06 => free, etc );

with the day's date as the key.

Thanks for our advice guys.

Mei

[bpat1434]

One idea is to use a unix timestamp and add 24 hours worth of seconds to the date. See if it's lower than an end date and above a beginning date.

So start with 04/01/08 and make that a unixtimestamp ([man]strtotime/man) then take 606024 to get the number of seconds in a day. And loop through. See if the calculated timestamp is between a beginning and ending date. If not, then list it as "free", otherwise list it as "booked".

[meigwil]

Thanks for your advice. I'll give it a try tonight.

Mei