which gives me two 14 numberic characters strings like: 20040202091212 20040201070500
How do I compare it to display something like this to the visitor:
You have $xdays day/s, $xhours hours and $xmins minutes before your account
expires
Been hitting the manual, but have either been searching in the wrong places
or....?
I think I will have to use "explode","strtotime" on this...but am not sure.
Ryan,
explode() won't help (nothing to explode on)
strtotime() won't help, as it can't work directly with the above date format
There's a decent comment on http://php.net/strtotime (RTFM????) by 'tobi at schluer dot de'
"...You can read the db using the UNIX_TIMESTAMP()-function, which returns the timestamp from the date(time) field. So you don't need to convert the dates in PHP, but let SQL do that job."
So, you can do it with MySQL. Otherwise, a function like this in PHP would do it:
<?
function mysqlToUnixStamp($in)
{
$y = substr($in,0,4);
$m = substr($in,4,2);
$d = substr($in,6,2);
$h = substr($in,8,2);
$i = substr($in,10,2);
$s = substr($in,12,2);
return mktime($h,$i,$s,$m,$d,$y);
}
?>So then pass your mysql stamps to it like this:
<? $d1 = '20040202091212'; $d2 = '20040201070500';
$d1 = mysqlToUnixStamp($d1); $d2 = mysqlToUnixStamp($d2); ?>
An you can then compare them (for example):
<?
if($d1 >= $d2) { /*something*/ }
?>Or find the difference in seconds:
<? $diff = $d1 - $d2; ?>
Converting this into a human readable "$xdays day/s, $xhours hours and $xmins minutes" is not exactly easy, but here's some hints for you to build on:
<?
function secondsToString($in)
{
$secsInDay = (60 * 60) * 24;
$secsInHour = 60 * 60;
$secsInMin = 60;
$ret = '';
if($in > $secsInDay)
{
$days = round($in / $secsInDay);
$remainder = $in % $secsInDay;
$ret .= "{$days} days, ";
}
if($remainder > $secsInHour)
{
$hours = round($remainder / $secsInHour);
$remainder = $in % $secsInHour;
$ret .= "{$hours} hours, ";
}
if($remainder > $secsInMin)
{
$mins = round($remainder / $secsInMin);
$remainder = $in % $secsInMin;
$ret .= "{$mins} mins, ";
}
// strip off last ', '
$ret = substr($ret,0,-2);
return $ret;
}// converting to human readable $timeLeft = secondsToString($diff);
// print to screen
echo "you have {$timeLeft} remain on your membership";
?>Out of all this, what you need to look-up in the manual and understand is the modulus (%), an arithmetic operator & substr().
http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.arithmetic.php http://www.php.net/substr
Justin French
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