Help with date comparison

[EchoFool]

I was just wondering if there was a way to compare two time stamps (one from a variable and one which is the "server time" of now, to see if the difference between the two is 1 hour or less? I know how to compare days but not sure how to compare on hours and minutes.

[.josh]

simple math...timestamp is in seconds. 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour...

 

$x = 100000;

$y =  90000;

$z = $x - $y; // 10000

$hours = $z / 60 / 60;

 

[EchoFool]

How would it work though because time stamps have this kinda format:

 

2008-07-26 16:05:05 not straight forward integer format with all the - and : symbols..

 

 

Also, if you wanted to grab the minutes of it do you just do:

 

 

$hours = $z / 60 / 60 / 60;  ?

[.josh]

no, time stamps are integers of the date in seconds since the unix epoch.  That's just a format.  What you want to do is use strtotime() to get the timestamp from your formatted times and then use some basic math.  Subtract one from the other, and you got the difference in seconds.  Divide that by 60, and you have the difference in minutes, etc...

[EchoFool]

Didn't quite seem to work for me !  :-\

 

I have:

 

<?php
$Date = 2008-07-26 14:50:58;
$Now = 2008-07-26 16:55:58;

$Date = strtotime($Date);
$Date2 = strtotime($Now); 

$Difference = $Date - $Date2;
$Difference = $Difference / 60;

Echo $Difference.' minutes';
?>

 

Response

-338079.873333 minutes

 

It should be in the negative but not by -338,079 minutes.

[.josh]

except for the fact that you didn't wrap your date/time formats in quotes, your script gave me -125 minutes

 

$Date = "2008-07-26 14:50:58";

$Now = "2008-07-26 16:55:58";

[EchoFool]

Yeah i thought it might have been that but when i did this to get the two times :

 

 

<?php
$Get = mysql_query("SELECT Date FROM table WHERE ID='$ID'")
Or die(mysql_error());
$row = mysql_fetch_assoc($Get);
$Date = $row['Date'];
$Now = date("Y-m-d H:i:s",time());
?>

 

I still got same answer.

[.josh]

hmm try putting backticks around `Date` and `table` in your query.  Date and table are mysql reserved words.  You can use them if you put backticks around them...though it's bad practice to use reserved words like that...

[DarkWater]

Wait wait wait.  How is the date stored in the MySQL database?  A DATETIME I hope, right?  You can then do:

 

"SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(Date) as timestamp FROM table WHERE ID=$ID"

 

Then, just do:

$date = $row['timestamp'];

$now = time();