How can I compare two dates in PHP?

php date compare
Sarmen B. picture Sarmen B. · Oct 3, 2010 · Viewed 271.5k times · Source

How can I compare two dates in PHP?

The date is stored in the database in the following format

2011-10-2

If I wanted to compare today's date against the date in the database to see which one is greater, how would I do it?

I tried this,

$today = date("Y-m-d");
$expire = $row->expireDate //from db

if($today < $expireDate) { //do something; }

but it doesn't really work that way. What's another way of doing it?

Answer

Hugo Peixoto picture Hugo Peixoto · Oct 3, 2010

If all your dates are posterior to the 1st of January of 1970, you could use something like:

$today = date("Y-m-d");
$expire = $row->expireDate; //from database

$today_time = strtotime($today);
$expire_time = strtotime($expire);

if ($expire_time < $today_time) { /* do Something */ }

If you are using PHP 5 >= 5.2.0, you could use the DateTime class:

$today_dt = new DateTime($today);
$expire_dt = new DateTime($expire);

if ($expire_dt < $today_dt) { /* Do something */ }

Or something along these lines.

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