[RESOLVED] Converting Times to days/hours/min ago...

juniper747

I have the following in my php, which takes a variable $date, retrieved from a mysql database... I want to check if I should display it in days, hours, minutes, or "just now" if it's under a minute.

Here's what I have:

// get the date from mysql
$date = $row["date"];

$diff = time() - strtotime($comment_date);
$days = floor($diff/(60*60*24));

if ($days > 1) {
	$echo_value = "$days days ago";
} else if ($days < 1) {
	$hours = floor($diff/(60*60));
	$echo_value = "$hours hours ago";
	if ($hours < 1) {
		$minutes = floor($diff/(60));
		$echo_value = "$minutes minutes ago";
		if ($minutes < 1) {
			$echo_value = "just now...";
		}
	}
}

For some reason, only the "day" value seems to be the accurate one, the others are off by a lot and I'm not sure why.

NogDog

Looks like you need to subtract the days * seconds-per-day from $diff before calculating the hours, the subtract those hours from $diff before calculating the minutes. Or you could use the modulus operator to get the remainder of your divisions.

juniper747

not sure I follow your way?... I think my code works, but there is some issue with date_default_timezone_get .... which is ony returning "UTC"

Weedpacket

juniper747 wrote:
I think my code works, but there is some issue with date_default_timezone_get .... which is ony returning "UTC"

Which it would if that were your default timezone (possibly because you haven't specified anything else).

juniper747

Ok I got it working now, after setting the time zone manually. However, now I am trying to implement and automatic way of detecting the users local time zone, I tried using the second method by, daneiracleous, posted here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.date-default-timezone-set.php

But for some reason it is putting me in the 'America/Halifax' time zone, while it should be in the 'America/New_York' time zone... any thoughts as to why?

Weedpacket

Umm ... why would you want to set the server's default timezone to that of the client? Even assuming for the moment that there is only one client at a time and therefore only one timezone to set it to?

P.S. Have you taken Daylight Saving into account?

juniper747

Whoops, didn't realize I was setting it to the server time zone. I am basically working on a comment system so I want the time zone to set to the same time zone as the person who enters the comment... How would I accomplish that?

Weedpacket

You want "the" time zone to set .... what time zone? And what does the time zone have to do with your original question anyway?

juniper747

What I mean is... When some one posts a comment, i want to show the date/time next to it, according to the poster's time zone. So if I am in New York, and it's 1pm, and someone in California posts a comment just now, in Cali it would appear as 10am, and in New York, it would show up as 1pm next to the comment...

Once I have this foundation, then my days/hours/minutes ago system would be working appropriately across all time zones... Sort of how Facebook/Google+ labels a time next to all of the comments/posts...

Weedpacket

Well, that still doesn't seem to have anything to do with your original post, but...

Assuming you know the client's timezone, and depending on how you're storing the "real" dates and times (whether your local timezone, UTC (which is what I generally use), or as a Unix timestamp (which is implicitly UTC)):
Create a DateTime object initialised with the "real" time of the post.
Change the object's timezone to match that of the client.
Ask the object for the time.

The below is not a solution. It just illustrates the sort of methods you'd be using. To find out just how, consult the manual.


$now = new DateTime("now");

echo $now->format('r'),"\t",$now->getTimeZone()->getName(),"\n";

$now->setTimezone(new DateTimeZone('Europe/Minsk')); 

echo $now->format('r'),"\t",$now->getTimeZone()->getName(),"\n";

juniper747

Thanks, thats very helpful...