Compare difference between two dates PHP

Question

I am trying to compare to date to figure out how much time is between them, which I know how to do, date_diff(), but I want to then compare the time between the dates and if it is greater than 7 days do something and if not do something else. I think it sounds easy and I know there are probably fairly simple solutions to do so but I am just not a fan of dates and comparisons. Here is a snippet of what I got so far as it is just one case of a switch statement so the rest are basically identical.

$array = array();
$today = date("Y-m-d"); // get today's date

foreach($arrayOfObjs as $obj){
    if ($obj->get("renewalDate") >= $today){
        array_push($array, $obj->get("renewalDate"));
    }else{
        switch($obj->get("recurrencePeriod")){
            case 1:
       /*
       * All cases follow same structure
       * Build the date in format Y-m-d from renewalDate out of the obj.
       * Loop through the date while it's less than today.
       * After date is greater than today return date add to array
       */

       $date = DateTime::createFromFormat("Y-m-d", $obj->get('renewalDate'));
       while($date <= $today){
          $date->add(new DateInterval('P7D'));
        }
        $diff = date_diff($today, $date);
        if($diff->format('%a') <= 7){
          $obj->renewalDate($date);
          array_push($array, $obj);
        }
        break;

Basically, my database stores dates and those dates could be passed but it could be a reoccurring event. To calculate the next time that event would happen I check if the data in the database is before today's date and if it is then I continue to add the incremental amount (in this case 7 for a weekly reoccurring event) and compare the dates again. After the date that is incremented passes today's date I want to find out if it is within 7 days and if so add it to an array to get returned. I know... since I'm adding 7and it's within 7 days the first reoccurring event will always be within 7 days but that is not the case for monthly events or anything greater.

All cases are broken so I only included this one for simplicity. I can get date_Diff to return something like 7 or 12 or whatever the number may be but how can I check if that number is within the 7 days I want?

Thanks, I will include more information if needed to clarify any misunderstandings.

Answer 1

I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to do, but how about the following if you are just projecting dates forward and backwards and want to know if they are 7 days or more either way:

$today = date("Y-m-d");
$todaytime = strtotime($today);

$testdate = "2017-06-31";
$testtime = strtotime($testdate);

$back7days = strtotime("-7 days",$todaytime);
if($testtime < $back7days)
    echo "X"; // do somthing if testdate was more than 7 days ago


$fwd7days = strtotime("+7 days", $todaytime);
if($testtime > $fwd7days)
    echo "Y"; // do somthing if testdate is more than 7 days in future  

Just make sure that you use less-than or less-than-and-equals comparators etc to handle the boundary conditions you need.