HTML Within Code + time() questions

drag0n

Hi; I have two unrelated questions.
One is how to use HTML code within my php tags without having to backslash every double quote? Right now I am using php to read the url _GET[] queries and displaying different html based on the url. However right now I have to close my php tags and then put the html and then open php tags to close bracket. There must be a easier and more efficient way of doing this...? I do not mind this method right now but I am sure this method slows down my script significantly right?

My second question is concerning the php time() function. I am storing a lot of different time() variables in my DB and i now need to compare some of those time variables both against each other and the current time. How would I do this? Do i subtract them? Then do I use the date() function to convert the difference in times to hours? I realize that date() is only to format the timestamp into human-readable formats; but say I need to test whether a user has been registered for a week or not. How would I do that? What is the format of the timestamp?

Thanks.

coldwerturkey

html inside php like this?

<?php echo"this is html"; ?>

time:
I personally use date() for recording all my time/date, lots of different options you can use. I'm personally a huge fan of YYYYMMDD format (or date("Ymd")), I find -for what I do in php it makes life so much easier- but I know alot of people will disagree with me,

this is how I would see if someone's been registered for +7 days, I know its not the best, but hopefully it will get you thinkin about how you want to do it,

$today = date("Ymd");
$registered = "20080801"; //or wtv it is from database

if (($today - $registered) >= 7 ) {
  echo "its been over 7days";
} else {
  echo "its been less than 7days";
}

Weedpacket

I'd recommend storing dates and times in the database using the database's date and time data types; then comparisons and date arithmetic can be done in the database to find the results you're looking for without having to get the data out, pulling it into PHP, doing the calculation, and then deciding you didn't want the result after all.

drag0n

Thanks for the replies.
For the html question; I meant whats the best way to escape double quotes without having to close php tag and opening again. I remember reading somewhere to use something like
<<<HTML
HTML;
But if I just decide to close php tag every time I need to have lots of html in the source and opening it again and repeating this type of method; would it slow down the script dramatically?

As for the time; unfortunately I have already coded most of the inserting time into the db and Im stuck with right now with all the times stored in the db under var(255) and using the php unix time stamp function. how can i compare timestamps against eachother without having to date() them and doing it efficently?

drag0n

Weedpacket

drag0n wrote:
...and doing it efficently?

By fixing your database schema. You should be able to add a new (correctly-typed) column and write a script to fetch the value from the existing column, convert it, and update the new column with the converted value (it may even be possible to do this entirely with a single UPDATE statement: consult the database's manual - consider it a learning experience). Then you can drop the existing column, and rename the new column.

For the HTML question: not dramatically. Not enough to fret over. If there are big chunks of HTML that PHP doesn't need to look at, it can be an improvement.