How do I format an amount of milliseconds into minutes:seconds:milliseconds in PHP?

Question

I have a total ammount of milliseconds (ie 70370) and I want to display it as minutes:seconds:milliseconds ie 00:00:0000.

How can I do this in PHP?

Answer 1

Don't fall into the trap of using date functions for this! What you have here is a time interval, not a date. The naive approach is to do something like this:

date("H:i:s.u", $milliseconds / 1000)

but because the date function is used for (gasp!) dates, it doesn't handle time the way you would want it to in this situation - it takes timezones and daylight savings, etc, into account when formatting a date/time.

Instead, you will probably just want to do some simple maths:

$input = 70135;

$uSec = $input % 1000;
$input = floor($input / 1000);

$seconds = $input % 60;
$input = floor($input / 60);

$minutes = $input % 60;
$input = floor($input / 60); 

// and so on, for as long as you require.