Comparing dates..

Mad_T

Hi
Have dates as follows :

$month;
$day;

echo'ing either of these returns values like :

Jan, Jun, Sep etc
1,13, 25 etc

Is there any way I can compare these values to todays day & month ??

I want a warning if they are over 1 day different !

Thanks for any pointers..

dalecosp

Take a look at [man]strtotime/man. It sounds like what you're thinking of to me.

bradgrafelman

[man]date/man can provide you with today's date in a variety of fashions, but I must ask two questions:

Why are the months being given to you in such an unusable form? Yes, "Sep" and "Jun" might look pretty to a human, but they're pretty useless when it comes to computers (especially when date arithmetic is involved).

In other words, asking a computer if "Sep" comes before "Jun" is a bit harder than asking it if 9 comes before 6.
You say you're comparing dates, but what you've given aren't actually dates (unless you make certain assumptions). For example, is Feb 2 more than one day apart from Feb 3? If you said no, you're wrong! I meant Feb 2 1966 vs. Feb 3 2011!

In other words, are we assuming that all dates are in the same year, meaning there is no such thing as the day "after" Dec 31 (since Jan 1 would loop back around to the start of the current assumed year)?

Mad_T

Thanks for the replies.
I can store the months as 1,2,3 etc.. and I agree this will be easier.

I'll have to assume the dates are the current year.

Does that help ?

Thanks
Peter

bradgrafelman

If you're assuming the dates are in the current year, you could always use [man]mktime/man to generate a Unix timestamp for each of the two month/day pairs and then find the difference between the two timestamps. Note, however, that this approach is a bit oversimplified since not every day is 24 hours in length.