Filter Array or XML with Time between Start and End Time

Question 1

Okay, so I wrote some PHP functions, to filter out what you demand.

To compare dates in php it is easiest to convert them to Unix time. That's what the first function does. Unix time is the time elapsed in seconds since January 1st, 1970. Converting them gives the advantage you can simply use < and > operators to compare two times.

The next function (nowBetween), looks if the current time is between the two times given through ($start and $end).

Then I took your JSON string (as we didn't really get to see the XML source when I wrote this post) and converted it to PHP arrays. We can be sure it are arrays, as the second parameter in json_decode is set to true.

Last but not least, I loop through all bookings in the "data" section of your JSON content, read the GMTStart and GMTEnd times and check if the current time is between them using our function. If not so, then I remove the booking from the $bookings array.

The result is only the bookings with the correct times stay. My output now was empty, but that's because your bookings date from 2014-05-09... When I adapted the time it worked.

I hope this answer suits your needs.

function convertDateTime($datetime) {
    //FORMAT IS date("YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss")
    $datetime = str_replace("T"," ",$datetime);
    return date("U",strtotime($datetime));
}
function nowBetween($start,$end) {
    $now = gmdate("U");
    $start = convertDateTime($start);
    $end = convertDateTime($end);
    if ($start <= $now && $end > $now) 
    { 
        return true;
    }
    else
    {
        return false;
    }
}

$bookings = '{"Bookings":{"Data":[{"BookingDate":["2014-05-09T00:00:00"],"RoomDescription":["Room06"],"TimeEventStart":["2014-05-09T14:00:00"],"TimeEventEnd":["2014-05-09T14:30:00"],"EventName":["Jake Long"],"SetupTypeDescription":["(none)"],"ReservationID":["137"],"OpenTime":["1900-01-01T00:00:00"],"CloseTime":["1900-01-01T00:00:00"],"EventTypeDescription":[[]],"BookingID":["709"],"TimeBookingStart":["2014-05-09T14:00:00"],"TimeBookingEnd":["2014-05-09T14:30:00"],"GMTStartTime":["2014-05-09T18:00:00"],"GMTEndTime":["2014-05-09T18:30:00"],"TimeZone":["ET"],"RoomCode":["R06"],"Room":["Room 6"],"RoomID":["34"],"StatusID":["3"],"EventTypeID":["0"],"DateAdded":["2014-05-09T13:47:29.087"],"DateChanged":["2014-05-09T13:47:29.087"],"ChangedBy":["Admin"]},{"BookingDate":["2014-05-09T00:00:00"],"RoomDescription":["Room06"],"TimeEventStart":["2014-05-09T18:00:00"],"TimeEventEnd":["2014-05-09T20:00:00"],"EventName":["Rob Brown"],"SetupTypeDescription":["(none)"],"ReservationID":["142"],"OpenTime":["1900-01-01T00:00:00"],"CloseTime":["1900-01-01T00:00:00"],"EventTypeDescription":[[]],"BookingID":["714"],"TimeBookingStart":["2014-05-09T18:00:00"],"TimeBookingEnd":["2014-05-09T20:00:00"],"GMTStartTime":["2014-05-09T22:00:00"],"GMTEndTime":["2014-05-10T00:00:00"],"TimeZone":["ET"],"RoomCode":["R06"],"Room":["Room 6"],"RoomID":["34"],"StatusID":["3"],"EventTypeID":["0"],"DateAdded":["2014-05-09T14:58:55.71"],"DateChanged":["2014-05-09T14:58:55.71"],"ChangedBy":["Admin"]},{"BookingDate":["2014-05-9T00:00:00"],"StartBookingDate":["2014-05-09T00:00:00"],"RoomDescription":["Room06"],"TimeEventStart":["2014-05-09T11:00:00"],"TimeEventEnd":["2014-05-09T12:00:00"],"EventName":["Jimmy James"],"SetupTypeDescription":["(none)"],"ReservationID":["141"],"OpenTime":["1900-01-01T00:00:00"],"CloseTime":["1900-01-01T00:00:00"],"EventTypeDescription":[[]],"BookingID":["713"],"TimeBookingStart":["2014-05-09T11:00:00"],"TimeBookingEnd":["2014-05-09T12:00:00"],"GMTStartTime":["2014-05-09T15:00:00"],"GMTEndTime":["2014-05-09T16:00:00"],"TimeZone":["ET"],"RoomCode":["R06"],"Room":["Room 6"],"RoomID":["34"],"StatusID":["1"],"EventTypeID":["0"],"DateAdded":["2014-05-09T14:58:15.17"],"DateChanged":["2014-05-09T14:58:15.17"],"ChangedBy":["Admin"]}]}}';
$bookings = json_decode($bookings,true);


foreach ($bookings["Bookings"]["Data"] as $index=>$arrContent) 
{
    if (!nowBetween($arrContent["GMTStartTime"][0],$arrContent["GMTEndTime"][0])) 
    {
        unset($bookings["Bookings"]["Data"][$index]);
    }
}

Question 2

You can filter the XML using Xpath. Xpath 1.0 can not compare strings, but you can register php functions, too.

So write the condition in PHP:

function isBetween($current, $min, $max) {
  $current = strtotime($current.'Z');
  $min = strtotime($min.'Z');
  $max = strtotime($max.'Z');
  return $current >= $min && $current <= $max;
}

Create an DOM document and load the XML. Create the Xpath instance register the PHP namespace and the function.

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadXml($xml);
$xpath = new DOMXpath($dom);
$xpath->registerNamespace("php", "http://php.net/xpath");
$xpath->registerPhpFunctions('isBetween');

Define an Xpath expression that uses the function to filter the Data element nodes:

// use gmtime() for current time
$now = strtotime('2014-05-13T14:00:00Z');
$expression = sprintf(
  '/Bookings/Data[
    php:function("isBetween", "%s", string(GMTStartTime), string(GMTEndTime))
   ]',
  gmdate('Y-m-d\\TH:i:s', $now)
);

Fetch the Data element nodes using the Xpath expression:

$result = [];
foreach($xpath->evaluate($expression) as $dataNode) {
  $record = [];
  // convert the matching data into a record array
  foreach ($xpath->evaluate('*', $dataNode) as $childNode) {
    $record[$childNode->localName] = $childNode->nodeValue;
  }
  $result[] = $record;
}
var_dump($result);

Demo: https://eval.in/151732

Question 3

As I understand you will receive several records in your < Bookings > ? Then you have two options: if number of records is always really big - more than a several thousands then you should use XPath to filter data BEFORE converting it to an array - copy nodes from XPath->query result to new document and convert this document to array. If the number of records is small then it is easier to convert them after - just use array_filter with a callback similar to this:

$filteredResult = array_filter($data, function($row) {
    // parse dates and compare them.    
});

And you will get filtered array.