Human-readable, current time sensitive date and time formatting in PHP

Question

Hi,

Is there a painless way to convert unix timestamps, MySQL timestamps, MySQL datetimes (or any other standard date and time format) into strings in the following form:

• Today, 6:00pm
• Tomorrow, 12:30pm
• Wednesday, 4:00pm
• Next friday, 11:00am

I'm not sure what to call these - I guess conversational-style, current time sensitive date formats?

Answer 1

The strtotime shoule be useful for that.

Example:

echo date('d, h:i:sa', strtotime($date_orig));

Answer 2

PHP date funcs are kind of messy because they have so many different ways, and even new classes were built over the old ones. For that type of formatting, what I call human-friendly formatting, you're going to have to write your own function that does it.

For conversion, you can use strtotime() as mentioned, but if you're dealing with epoch times and need utc GMT times, heres some functions for that. strtotime() would convert the epoch time to the local server time... this was something I don't want on my projects.

/**
 * Converts a GMT date in UTC format (ie. 2010-05-05 12:00:00)
 * Into the GMT epoch equivilent
 * The reason why this doesnt work: strtotime("2010-05-05 12:00:00")
 * Is because strtotime() takes the servers timezone into account
 */
function utc2epoch($str_date)
{
    $time = strtotime($str_date);
    //now subtract timezone from it
    return strtotime(date("Z")." sec", $time);
}

function epoch2utc($epochtime, $timezone="GMT")
{
    $d=gmt2timezone($epochtime, $timezone);
    return $d->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');
}

Answer 3

You should read the docs for strftime and strtotime

An example of converting UNIX timestamp to your format:

$time = time(); // UNIX timestamp for current time
echo strftime("%A, %l:%M %P"); // "Thursday, 12:41 pm"

To get a MySQL datetime value, assuming it comes out of the database as "2010-07-15 12:42:34", try this:

$time = "2010-07-15 12:42:34";
echo strftime("%A, %l:%M %P"); // "Thursday, 12:42 pm"

Now, in order to print the word "today" instead of the day name you will have to do some additional logic to check if the date is today:

$time = "2010-07-15 12:42:34";
$today = strftime("%Y-%m-%d");

// compare if $time strftime's to the same date as $today
if(strftime("%Y-%m-%d", $time) == $today) {
  echo strftime("Today, %l:%M %P", $time);
} else {
  echo strftime("%A, %l:%M %P", $time);
}

Answer 4

As best I can tell, there is no native function for this. I have created (the start of) a function to do what you are wanting.

function timeToString( $inTimestamp ) {
  $now = time();
  if( abs( $inTimestamp-$now )<86400 ) {
    $t = date('g:ia',$inTimestamp);
    if( date('zY',$now)==date('zY',$inTimestamp) )
      return 'Today, '.$t;
    if( $inTimestamp>$now )
      return 'Tomorrow, '.$t;
    return 'Yesterday, '.$t;
  }
  if( ( $inTimestamp-$now )>0 ) {
    if( $inTimestamp-$now < 604800 ) # Within the next 7 days
      return date( 'l, g:ia' , $inTimestamp );
    if( $inTimestamp-$now < 1209600 ) # Within the next 14, but after the next 7 days
      return 'Next '.date( 'l, g:ia' , $inTimestamp );
  } else {
    if( $now-$inTimestamp < 604800 ) # Within the last 7 days
      return 'Last '.date( 'l, g:ia' , $inTimestamp );
  }
 # Some other day
  return date( 'l jS F, g:ia' , $inTimestamp );
}

Hope that helps.

Answer 5

If you are pulling this type of data out of your database

$time = "2010-07-15 12:42:34";

then do this

$this->db->select('DATE_FORMAT(date, "%b %D %Y")AS date');

Look here for info to display your data any way you want in human form

http://www.w3schools.com/SQL/func_date_format.asp

The above code is in codeigniter format, but you can just convert it to a SELECT statement for MYSQL

$query = "SELECT `title`,`post`, DATE_FORMAT(date, "%a, %d %b %Y %T") AS date FROM `posts` LIMIT 0, 8 ";

You will want to change the %a letters to fit your needs.