Check an expiry date

[chrislead]

Hey,

I want to be able to check the expiry of a date. I.e. in plain english;

'if today's date is more than a date specified...do this'

Should be simple right? So far I have this:

// This is a date +3 months into the future
$date = date("jS M Y", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month + 3, $day, $year));

// My conditional
if (date("jS M Y", time()) > $date) {

// Do something
// ...

This seems to work fine, but for some reason I am told by some of my users that after a random amount of time, this doesn't seem valid and they are shown an expired response sooner than they should be with this conditional.

I was wondering if this was the correct way to check a date? Am I ok using '>' or is there another way to form a conditional here?

Thanks.

[leatherback]

hm.. I think you can just do it like this:

if(time() > mktime(0, 0, 0, $month + 3, $day, $year))
  {
  // expired
  }

[chrislead]

Thanks for your mega fast reply!

That still seems to output what I initially expected so fingers crossed that sorts it out!

Thanks again!

[bradgrafelman]

leatherback's method is the best way to do it in PHP - the dates are compared as simple integers.

If you're using MySQL, however, note that you can do simple date comparisons within the query.