PHP Date Question

Question

I am trying to do a little bit of math using dates in PHP. I am modifying a shoutbox, and I want to implement the following functionality.

---

If post date = today, return time of post

else if date = yesterday, return "yesterday"

else date = X days ago

---

How would I use php's date functions to calculate how many days ago a timestamp is (the timestamp is formatted in UNIX time)

Answer 1

Try this:

$shoutDate = date('Y-m-d', $shoutTime);
if ($shoutDate == date('Y-m-d'))
    return date('H:i', $shoutTime);

if ($shoutDate == date('Y-m-d', mktime(0, 0, 0, date('m'), date('d') - 1, date('Y'))))
    return 'yesterday';

return gregoriantojd(date('m'), date('d'), date('y')) - gregoriantojd(date('m', $shoutTime), date('d', $shoutTime), date('y', $shoutTime)) . ' days ago';

Answer 2

In php 5.3.0 or higher, you can use DateTime::diff (aka date_diff()).

In pretty much any php, you can convert the dates to Unix timestamps and divide the difference between them by 86400 (1 day in seconds).