PHP: get number of days between two dates in format YYYY-MM-DD

Question

Possible Duplicate:
How to find number of days between two dates using php

Is there a quick and easy way to calculate the difference in days between two date strings in this format (YYYY-MM-DD) with PHP (not MySQL)?

Answer 1

$date1 = new DateTime("2010-07-06"); //inclusive
$date2 = new DateTime("2010-07-09"); //exclusive
$diff = $date2->diff($date1);
echo $diff->format("%a"); //3

(PHP 5.3 and higher only)

The only solution I see for PHP < 5.2 is to loop:

strtotime("-1 days");
strtotime("-2 days");
...
strtotime("-n days");

until we get to the unix timestamp of the first date. That's conceptually, you can do it in a much more efficient way, by first guessing the number of days with the timestamp difference of the two days and then testing the neighborhood.

Why dividing by 86400 doesn't work

date_default_timezone_set("Europe/Lisbon");
$date1 = strtotime("2010-03-28");
$date2 = strtotime("2010-03-29");
echo ($date2-$date1)/86400; //gives 0.95833333333333
$date1 = strtotime("2010-10-31");
$date2 = strtotime("2010-11-01");
echo ($date2-$date1)/86400; //gives 1.0416666666667

As Gordon correctly has pointed out, dividing by 86400 would be a valid solution for this problem if the timezone was set to 'UTC' before – just don't forget to restore it to the previous value after.

Answer 2

You can use this function to get the number of days between two date("Y-m-d H:i:s"):

function dateDiff($dateStart, $dateEnd) 
{
    $start = strtotime($dateStart);
    $end = strtotime($dateEnd);
    $days = $end - $start;
    $days = ceil($days/86400);
    return $days;
}

Answer 3

Copied from the Duplicate I've linked below the question.

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