确定日期时间是否在时间范围内的最有效方法

Question

I have a cronjob, that kicks in every 5 minutes. It should do some tasks only at specific times of the day (eg morning and evening).

What's php's most effective / elegant way to determine if the DateTime of now is in between the 5 minute time frame in that the cronjob may kick in?

At the moment I'm doing:

$date = new DateTime();

$hour = (int)$date->format('H');
$min = (int)$date->format('i');

if($hour == 7 && ($min >= 40 || $min < 45)) {
    // Do something in the morning
}

if($hour == 21 && ($min >= 00 && $min < 05)) {
    // Do something in the evening
}

But this seems like a lot of code. Ain't there something like

$date->isInTimeRane($begin, $end);

as native php code?

Answer 1

If $begin and $end are of type DateTime as well, you can simply use them like this:

if ($begin <= $date && $date <= $end) {
    // .. date is within the range from $begin -> $end ..

---

To address your specific problem, how about this (quite elegant) function:

function isWithinTimerange($hours, $minutes, $timerangeInMinutes = 5) {
    $now = new DateTime();

    $begin = clone $now;
    $begin->setTime($hours, $minutes);

    $end = clone $begin;
    $end->modify('+'. intval($timerangeInMinutes) .' minutes');

    return ($begin <= $now && $now < $end);
}

if (isWithinTimerange(7, 40)) {
    // ...

Answer 2

You can extend DateTime to add your own methods to it. I would do it this way:-

class MyDateTime extends DateTime
{
    /**
    * Checks if this DateTime is between two others
    * @param DateTime $start
    * @param DateTime $end
    * @return boolean 
    */
    public function inRange(DateTime $start, DateTime $end){
        return ($this >= $start && $this <= $end);
    }
}

Then you can simply do:-

$begin = new DateTime($sometime);
$end = new DateTime($someLaterTime);
$myTime = new MyDateTime($yetAnotherTime);
var_dump($myTime->inRange($begin, $end);

That is the cleanest way I can think of of doing it and pretty much what you asked for.

Answer 3

You can use the UNIX time instead (seconds since Jan,1,1970 aka Epoch). Then logic should be something like the following.

<?php
$current_time = time(); //Get timestamp
$cron_time = (int) ;// Time cron job runs (you can use strtotime() here)
$five_minutes = 300; //Five minutes are 300 seconds 

if($current_time > $cron_time && $current_time - $cron_time >= $five_minutes) {
echo "Cron Job is too late";
} elseif($current_time >= $cron_time && $five_minutes >= $current_time - $cron_time){
echo "Cron Job ran within time frame";
}

?>