How to count days between two dates in PHP?

Question

If I have a couple of strings $startDate and $endDate which are set to (for instance) "2011/07/01" and "2011/07/17" (meaning 1 July 2011 and 17 July 2011). How would I count the days from start date to end date? In the example given, it would be 17 days.

Answer 1

Here is the raw way to do it

$startTimeStamp = strtotime("2011/07/01"); $endTimeStamp = strtotime("2011/07/17");  $timeDiff = abs($endTimeStamp - $startTimeStamp);  $numberDays = $timeDiff/86400;  // 86400 seconds in one day  // and you might want to convert to integer $numberDays = intval($numberDays); 

Answer 2

Use DateTime::diff (aka date_diff):

$datetime1 = new DateTime('2009-10-11'); $datetime2 = new DateTime('2009-10-13'); $interval = $datetime1->diff($datetime2); 

Or:

$datetime1 = date_create('2009-10-11'); $datetime2 = date_create('2009-10-13'); $interval = date_diff($datetime1, $datetime2); 

You can then get the interval as a integer by calling $interval->days.