CODEWITHSUNDEEP
php
Aventinus
Aventinus

Reputation: 1382

Function that calculates the time difference but takes into account only the hours in PHP

I have a calendar in which the user can save events. Each event has a $start_time and an $end_time. The times are saved in HH:mm:ss format. Is there a function which calculates the differnce between the two times but takes into account only the hours, not minutes and seconds? For instance if $start_time = 09.00.00 and $end_time = 12.00.00 then difference(start_time, end_time) should be 3.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 76

Answers (2)

Sam Dufel
Sam Dufel

Reputation: 17598

The DateTime class has a method to compare dates -

$start = new DateTime('04:13:41');  // accepts the same formats as strtotime
$end = new DateTime('08:31:13');
$diff = $start->diff($end);         // pass 'true' as the second param for absolute
echo $diff->h;                      // 'h' contains the difference in hours

Upvotes: 1

arielnmz
arielnmz

Reputation: 9125

You can calculate the difference by parsing the string into a numeric format with the strtotime() function, then calculate the time delta and parse it back to a string representation with date(), like so:

$delta = strtotime($end_time) - strtotime($start_time);
$timediff = date('H', $delta);

Or you can strip out the seconds and minutes before the substraction like so:

$end_time_hrs = date('H', strtotime($end_time));
$start_time_hrs = date('H', strtotime($start_time));

And then the difference:

$delta = strtotime($end_time_hrs) - strtotime($start_time_hrs);
$timediff = date('H', $delta);

Upvotes: 0

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