PHP - Formatting a Date

Question

I have a date stored into a string variable as such: Sun Jun 02 08:54:12 EDT 2013. How can I convert this into a date variable to compare the time difference between the current date and the date provided. Thanks!

Answer 1

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 ... ;)