Organising dates in PHP

Question

Hi All,

Im wanting to organize a series of dates in the following format. As a bit of context, the dates are the dates of upcoming events that can be added by my users. The format:

January 2011

date - event

date - event

date - event

February 2011

date - event

date - event

date - event

with all events in a given month, arranged by the date on which they occur. All of my event dates are stored in my database as unix timestamps. Problem is, i dotn know where id start to develop a function that would order all of my events in this way. Can anyone help me out?

Cheers

Answer 1

Iterate the events; keep track of the last MONTH seen. If the current month != previous month, display a month separator.

$lastDate = '';

foreach ($events as $e)
{   
    $currDate = date('F Y', $e->date);
    if ($currDate != $lastDate )
    {
        echo "<h1>$currDate</h1>";
    }
    // might want to format the date to be human readable here...
    echo "<li>$e->date, $e->event"; 
    $lastDate = $currDate;

}

Answer 2

I like to group the items first using an array index.

Controller

$months = array();
foreach ($rows as $row) {
    $month = date('F Y', strtotime($row['date']);

    if (!isset($months[$month]) {
        $months[$month] = array();
    }

    $months[$month][] = $row;
}

View

foreach ($months as $month => $events) {
    echo '<h2>' . $month . '</h2>';
    foreach ($events as $event) {
        // ...
    }
}