Comparing two dates in PHP and MYSQL

Question

I want to compare two dates and time values in PHP. One date is coming from MySQL, and second one is the current date. I want to run some code when both dates are the same. I tried the code below, but condition satisfies any time which is wrong.

$current_datetime = date('Y-m-d H:i');
$send_date = date("Y-m-d H:i", strtotime($row['send_date'])); // suppose $row['send_date']'s value is '2016-10-17 15:00'
if($current_datetime == $send_date){
    //I want to run some code here
}else{
}

What is wrong with the code? I also tried to covert both dates with strtotime() before comparing, but it gave me the same issue. The above condition satisfies any time even if both dates are different.

Answer 1

Try this :

$current_datetime = date('Y-m-d H:i');
$send_date = date("Y-m-d H:i", strtotime($row['send_date'])); // suppose $row['send_date']'s value is '2016-10-17 15:00'
if(strtotime($current_datetime) == strtotime($send_date)){
    //I want to run some code here
}else{
}

Hope it helps !!!!

Answer 2

One way is to fetch the Unix timestamp (seconds since '1970-01-01 00:00:00' UTC) from MySQL, then operate on the numbers:

$row = get_db_row("SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(send_date) AS send_date_ts
  FROM table WHERE $condition");
$hours = (int) ($row['send_date_ts'] / 3600);
$current_hours = (int) (time() / 3600);
if ($hours == $current_hours) {
  // current hour
}

Timestamps are convenient because:

• there is no need to take the format into account;
• operations on numbers are usually faster;
• the code looks cleaner.