Count iterations of PHP DatePeriod()

Question

I understand how date period works with one exception, is there a way to find out from date period how many intervals there are?

So for instance:

// define the period of the range
$period = new DatePeriod($begin, $rangeType, $end);

// iterate through the dates in range
foreach ( $period as $dt ) {
}

This is what I would like to do from the above code:

echo count($period);

Basically I want to know how many time the foreach loop will end up running.

Answer 1

You can use the iterator_count function for this:

echo(iterator_count($period));

Answer 2

Assuming that you are interested in counting the number of days only (regardless of the interval spec) - thx @mark-amery for bringing this up!

Another more obvious approach would be to diff the 2 dates and get the number of days from the result.

$numDays = $end->diff($begin)->days;
$numDaysFormatted = $end->diff($begin)->format('%d days');

Be sure to validate your GET vars to avoid date warnings / errors.

Better late than never ;-)

EDIT:

If you only have a period object you do have access to the start and end of the period.

$numDays = $period
    ->getEndDate()
    ->diff($period->getStartDate())
    ->days;