Getting the Difference Between Two Time/Dates Using PHP

How to get time difference in minutes in PHP

Subtract the past most one from the future most one and divide by 60.

Times are done in Unix format so they're just a big number showing the number of seconds from January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 GMT

How to calculate the difference between two dates using PHP?

Use this for legacy code (PHP < 5.3). For up to date solution see jurka's answer below

You can use strtotime() to convert two dates to unix time and then calculate the number of seconds between them. From this it's rather easy to calculate different time periods.

$date1 = "2007-03-24";
$date2 = "2009-06-26";

$diff = abs(strtotime($date2) - strtotime($date1));

$years = floor($diff / (365*60*60*24));
$months = floor(($diff - $years * 365*60*60*24) / (30*60*60*24));
$days = floor(($diff - $years * 365*60*60*24 - $months*30*60*60*24)/ (60*60*24));

printf("%d years, %d months, %d days\n", $years, $months, $days);

Edit: Obviously the preferred way of doing this is like described by jurka below. My code is generally only recommended if you don't have PHP 5.3 or better.

Several people in the comments have pointed out that the code above is only an approximation. I still believe that for most purposes that's fine, since the usage of a range is more to provide a sense of how much time has passed or remains rather than to provide precision - if you want to do that, just output the date.

Despite all that, I've decided to address the complaints. If you truly need an exact range but haven't got access to PHP 5.3, use the code below (it should work in PHP 4 as well). This is a direct port of the code that PHP uses internally to calculate ranges, with the exception that it doesn't take daylight savings time into account. That means that it's off by an hour at most, but except for that it should be correct.

<?php

/**
 * Calculate differences between two dates with precise semantics. Based on PHPs DateTime::diff()
 * implementation by Derick Rethans. Ported to PHP by Emil H, 2011-05-02. No rights reserved.
 * 
 * See here for original code:
 * http://svn.php.net/viewvc/php/php-src/trunk/ext/date/lib/tm2unixtime.c?revision=302890&view=markup
 * http://svn.php.net/viewvc/php/php-src/trunk/ext/date/lib/interval.c?revision=298973&view=markup
 */

function _date_range_limit($start, $end, $adj, $a, $b, $result)
{
    if ($result[$a] < $start) {
        $result[$b] -= intval(($start - $result[$a] - 1) / $adj) + 1;
        $result[$a] += $adj * intval(($start - $result[$a] - 1) / $adj + 1);
    }

    if ($result[$a] >= $end) {
        $result[$b] += intval($result[$a] / $adj);
        $result[$a] -= $adj * intval($result[$a] / $adj);
    }

    return $result;
}

function _date_range_limit_days($base, $result)
{
    $days_in_month_leap = array(31, 31, 29, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31);
    $days_in_month = array(31, 31, 28, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31);

    _date_range_limit(1, 13, 12, "m", "y", &$base);

    $year = $base["y"];
    $month = $base["m"];

    if (!$result["invert"]) {
        while ($result["d"] < 0) {
            $month--;
            if ($month < 1) {
                $month += 12;
                $year--;
            }

            $leapyear = $year % 400 == 0 || ($year % 100 != 0 && $year % 4 == 0);
            $days = $leapyear ? $days_in_month_leap[$month] : $days_in_month[$month];

            $result["d"] += $days;
            $result["m"]--;
        }
    } else {
        while ($result["d"] < 0) {
            $leapyear = $year % 400 == 0 || ($year % 100 != 0 && $year % 4 == 0);
            $days = $leapyear ? $days_in_month_leap[$month] : $days_in_month[$month];

            $result["d"] += $days;
            $result["m"]--;

            $month++;
            if ($month > 12) {
                $month -= 12;
                $year++;
            }
        }
    }

    return $result;
}

function _date_normalize($base, $result)
{
    $result = _date_range_limit(0, 60, 60, "s", "i", $result);
    $result = _date_range_limit(0, 60, 60, "i", "h", $result);
    $result = _date_range_limit(0, 24, 24, "h", "d", $result);
    $result = _date_range_limit(0, 12, 12, "m", "y", $result);

    $result = _date_range_limit_days(&$base, &$result);

    $result = _date_range_limit(0, 12, 12, "m", "y", $result);

    return $result;
}

/**
 * Accepts two unix timestamps.
 */
function _date_diff($one, $two)
{
    $invert = false;
    if ($one > $two) {
        list($one, $two) = array($two, $one);
        $invert = true;
    }

    $key = array("y", "m", "d", "h", "i", "s");
    $a = array_combine($key, array_map("intval", explode(" ", date("Y m d H i s", $one))));
    $b = array_combine($key, array_map("intval", explode(" ", date("Y m d H i s", $two))));

    $result = array();
    $result["y"] = $b["y"] - $a["y"];
    $result["m"] = $b["m"] - $a["m"];
    $result["d"] = $b["d"] - $a["d"];
    $result["h"] = $b["h"] - $a["h"];
    $result["i"] = $b["i"] - $a["i"];
    $result["s"] = $b["s"] - $a["s"];
    $result["invert"] = $invert ? 1 : 0;
    $result["days"] = intval(abs(($one - $two)/86400));

    if ($invert) {
        _date_normalize(&$a, &$result);
    } else {
        _date_normalize(&$b, &$result);
    }

    return $result;
}

$date = "1986-11-10 19:37:22";

print_r(_date_diff(strtotime($date), time()));
print_r(_date_diff(time(), strtotime($date)));

Getting the difference between two time/dates using php?

Parse the times into timestamps using strtotime() and then simply subtract one from the other.

After that you can get the number of minutes, days and so on by using math functions.

For example:

// $date1 and $date2 are given
// the difference is in seconds
$difference = strtotime($date1) - strtotime($date2);

// getting the difference in minutes
$difference_in_minutes = $difference / 60;

Reference: strtotime()

PHP difference between two times

Substring at the first colon to remove the label, then use the remaining time stamp for parsing and subtracting.

Use PHP's strtotime method to convert the times as strings into longs, then subtract the two to find the difference in seconds. You'll have a number at this point, which you can then do whatever with.

$datetime1 = substr($datetime1, strpos($datetime1, ":"));
$time1 = strtotime($datetime1);

You can then use the date method to convert the time difference into a new string for outputting.

See:

• http://php.net/manual/en/function.substr.php
• http://php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php
• http://php.net/manual/en/function.strpos.php
• http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

how to count the difference between the two time in php and show it

You can create DateTime instances and use diff function to get the difference between 2 times. You can then format them in hours,minutes and seconds.

<?php

$hour1 = '12:00:00';
$hour2 = '09:00:00';

$o1 = new DateTime($hour1);
$o2 = new DateTime($hour2);

$diff = $o1->diff($o2,true); // to make the difference to be always positive.

echo $diff->format('%H:%I:%S');

Demo: https://3v4l.org/X41pv

Getting time difference between two times in PHP

You can use strtotime() for time calculation. Here is an example:

$checkTime = strtotime('09:00:59');
echo 'Check Time : '.date('H:i:s', $checkTime);
echo '<hr>';

$loginTime = strtotime('09:01:00');
$diff = $checkTime - $loginTime;
echo 'Login Time : '.date('H:i:s', $loginTime).'<br>';
echo ($diff < 0)? 'Late!' : 'Right time!'; echo '<br>';
echo 'Time diff in sec: '.abs($diff);

echo '<hr>';

$loginTime = strtotime('09:00:59');
$diff = $checkTime - $loginTime;
echo 'Login Time : '.date('H:i:s', $loginTime).'<br>';
echo ($diff < 0)? 'Late!' : 'Right time!';

echo '<hr>';

$loginTime = strtotime('09:00:00');
$diff = $checkTime - $loginTime;
echo 'Login Time : '.date('H:i:s', $loginTime).'<br>';
echo ($diff < 0)? 'Late!' : 'Right time!';

Demo

Check the already-asked question - how to get time difference in minutes:

Subtract the past-most one from the future-most one and divide by 60.

Times are done in unix format so they're just a big number showing the
number of seconds from January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT

get the difference in time between two given time

String in php is not object, so can't call diff method on it.

Use diff method, you must change the string to DateTime object.

If you want to compare time difference in same day, you could try:

$start_time = "17:00:01";
$end_time = "17:47:25";

$start_datetime = new DateTime(date('Y-m-d').' '.$start_time);
$end_datetime = new DateTime(date('Y-m-d').' '.$end_time);

var_dump($start_datetime->diff($end_datetime));

Finding the number of days between two dates

$now = time(); // or your date as well
$your_date = strtotime("2010-01-31");
$datediff = $now - $your_date;

echo round($datediff / (60 * 60 * 24));

How do I find the hour difference between two dates in PHP?

You can convert them to timestamps and go from there:

$hourdiff = round((strtotime($time1) - strtotime($time2))/3600, 1);

Dividing by 3600 because there are 3600 seconds in one hour and using round() to avoid having a lot of decimal places.

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