Problem:
You have to dates and you want to calculate hours between those two dates.
Solution:
In the following you’ll see two methods to finds out hour difference between two dates
Method 1: Using strtotime() function
Using strtotime() function to find out hours is two steps process
- Convert each date to its equivalent timestamp (as you know, timestamp is number of seconds since January 1 1970 00:00:00 UTC)
- Divide the timestamp by (60*60) to get the number of hours.
See the following example how it works-
<?php $date1 = "2014-05-27 01:00:00"; $date2 = "2014-05-28 02:00:00"; $timestamp1 = strtotime($date1); $timestamp2 = strtotime($date2); echo "Difference between two dates is " . $hour = abs($timestamp2 - $timestamp1)/(60*60) . " hour(s)"; ?>
[wpdm_file id=119]
Output:
Difference between two dates is 25 hour(s)
How it works:
| Line 3: We convert the first date to its timestamp.Line 4: We convert the second date to its timestamp.Line 5: As the difference between two dates might be negative, we use absolute function, abs(), to get the value only. Then, we divided it by 60*60 to get the hours. |
Method 2: Using diff() method of DateTIme class from SPL
Calculating hours between two dates is 3 steps process-
- Convert each date to the DateTime object
- Calculate the day interval between two dates as object using diff() method.
- Convert the Day interval object to its equivalent number of hours using format() method.
<?php
$hour1 = 0; $hour2 = 0;
$date1 = "2014-05-27 01:00:00";
$date2 = "2014-05-28 02:00:00";
$datetimeObj1 = new DateTime($date1);
$datetimeObj2 = new DateTime($date2);
$interval = $datetimeObj1->diff($datetimeObj2);
if($interval->format('%a') > 0){
$hour1 = $interval->format('%a')*24;
}
if($interval->format('%h') > 0){
$hour2 = $interval->format('%h');
}
echo "Difference between two dates is " . ($hour1 + $hour2) . " hours.";
?>
[wpdm_file id=120]
Output:
Difference between two dates is 25 hour(s)
How it works:
| Line 5-6: We convert two dates to their respective DateTime objects.Line 7: The diff() method subtracts $datetimeObj1 from $datetimeObj2 and returns as an object.Line 9-11: Here, we check if the interval between two dates is more than 1 day. If so, we convert the day to hours by multiplying it by 24. Here, format(‘%a’) returns total number of days. Line 12-14: Line 16: |