PHP Countdown to Date

Question

How could set a date and get a countdown in PHP? For example if I set the date as 3 December 2PM it would tell me how many days and hours are remaining.

No need for user inputs for the date as it will be hard coded.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use the strtotime function to get the time of the date specified, then use time to get the difference.

$date = strtotime("December 3, 2009 2:00 PM");
$remaining = $date - time();

$remaining will be the number of seconds remaining. Then you can divide that number to get the number of days, hours, minutes, etc.

$days_remaining = floor($remaining / 86400);
$hours_remaining = floor(($remaining % 86400) / 3600);
echo "There are $days_remaining days and $hours_remaining hours left";

Answer 2

It's not as trivial as subtracting strtotime() results, since there are daylight savings and time would be mathematically correct, but not physically. Anyway, for these purposes you should use gmdate() function, which has no daylight savings:

$date = gmdate('U', strtotime('2009-12-03 14:00'));

// Get difference between both dates without DST
$diff = $date - gmdate('U');
// Days (in last day it will be zero)
$diff_days = floor($remaining / (24 * 60 * 60));
// Hours (in the last hour will be zero)
$diff_hours = floor($remaining % (24 * 60 * 60) / 3600);

Answer 3

PHP 5.3 allows this:

$dt_end = new DateTime('December 3, 2009 2:00 PM');
$remain = $dt_end->diff(new DateTime());
echo $remain->d . ' days and ' . $remain->h . ' hours';

Answer 4

Hi

Thanks for such a great script -so Hoe then do I get to the remaining minutes as well? I f I could help I would kindly ask you to put the comments at each step so that I can really grasp it this has given me so much head ache-The other thing I have used your code on my pages but it does not behave consistently-sometimes it display some counts in negative, please help

regards gugu