[RESOLVED] NEED HELP COUNTING HOLIDAYS WITHIN RANGE OF DATES

DaleRobbins

I'm trying to count the number of holidays between a range of two dates... for instance between April 13th and May 26th. I created an array of holidays and just want to return the total number of holidays that fall between the two dates... in this case would be 2.

I don't have a clue how to do this... I would appreciate any assistance,

<?php
$holidays = array(
    'Jan 1',
    'Jul 4',
    'April 15',
    'May 22',
    'Dec 25'
);

$numHolidays = count($holidays);
echo $numHolidays;
?>

bradgrafelman

One thing you could do is convert all of the dates into a Unix timestamp, which is nothing more than an integer representing the number of second since the Unix epoch. Then, you could loop through the holidays and see if the date is >= the beginning of the date range and <= the end of the range... if so, increase the count.

If you wanted to, you could leave the dates in a more readable format (e.g. "Jan 1" instead of 1262325600) and convert them on-the-fly using [man]strtotime/man. Example:

for($i=0, $count=0, $start=strtotime($range_begin), $end=strtotime($range_end); isset($holidays[$i]); $i++)
{
    $holiday = strtotime($holidays[$i]);

while($holiday >= $start && $holiday <= $end)
{
  $count++;
  $holiday = strtotime('+1 year', $holiday);
}
}

See if you can make sense of what I did there - feel free to ask any questions if you aren't sure what something means (or why I did it).

DaleRobbins

You're so kind to take your time to help... but I must be a complete dunce. I don't seem to get it... look at what I have below.

$range_begin = "04/12/2010";
$range_end = "05/29/2010";

$holidays = array(
'Jan 1',
'Jul 4',
'Mar 5',
'Apr 7',
'Dec 25',
// ...
);

for($i=0, $count=0, $start=strtotime($range_begin), $end=strtotime($range_end); isset($holidays[$i]); $i++)
{
$holiday = strtotime($holidays[$i]);

while($holiday >= $start && $holiday <= $end)
{
  $count++;
  $holiday = strtotime('+1 year', $holiday);

  }

}

echo $holiday;

bradgrafelman

You're echo'ing out the wrong variable - $holiday is just a temporary placeholder used when looping through the array.

Look again and see which variable actually gets incremented.

jkurrle

Dale,

Are you tying the holidays to a specific year? For instance, Memorial Day, Labor Day and Easter change each year. Or are you just looking at specific holidays that stay the same every year? Just curious if you are going to simply put in the dates, or if you are going to calculate them out.

When it comes to dates, PHP date functions tend to convert to a seconds based timestamp (number of seconds since Jan 1st, 1970, I think). You can use time() to get a current snapshot, or strtotime() to set a date in time to a snapshot date.

So, convert all your holiday dates to snapshot dates within an array, convert your start and end dates to snapshot dates, and use a foreach() statement to evaluate each holiday date to see if it's between the start date and end date. If it is, increment a counter by 1. When done processing the foreach() loop, you have a count of how many holidays fit within the set.

DaleRobbins

Hey... bradgrafelman, I get it now. I was only half a dunce! This is what I was trying to accomplish. It works fine. Thanks!! Thanks for your reply too jkurrle!

$range_begin = "Apr 1";

$range_end = "June 1";

$holidays = array(
'May 12',
'Jul 4',
'Mar 5',
'Apr 7',
'Apr 16',
'Dec 25',
// ...
);

for($i=0, $count=0, $start=strtotime($range_begin), $end=strtotime($range_end); isset($holidays[$i]); $i++)
{
$holiday = strtotime($holidays[$i]);

while($holiday >= $start && $holiday <= $end)
{
  $count++;
  $holiday = strtotime('+1 year', $holiday);

  }

}

echo $count++;

bradgrafelman

DaleRobbins wrote:
echo $count++;

By doing that, you're incrementing $count after you echo it. The '++' is a post-increment operator - see this manual page for more info on these operators: [man]language.operators.increment[/man].

DaleRobbins

I see... I got it now. Thanks so much.