Use the DateTime
class to compare the current date with the timestring. Once you have the DateTime
objects you can easily get the difference using the method DateTime::diff()
. It will return a DateInterval
object that can be printed using it's format()
method.
$dt = new DateTime('Sun Jun 02 08:54:12');
$now = new DateTime();
if($now > $dt) {
$difference = $now->diff($dt);
echo $difference->format('The time is %H hours %I minutes %S seconds in the past');
} else if ($now < $dt) {
$difference = $dt->diff($now);
echo $difference->format('The time is %H hours %I minutes %S seconds in the future');
} else {
echo 'the time is now';
}
Note: Of course you'll have to extend the output in a way that it displays the difference in years, months and days additionally. I didn't that in the example, because I'm lazy ... aehhmm because the string would get too long for the example ... ;)