How can I get number of days, hours, minutes and second from now to a date-time given in the MySQL database?

Question

In my MySQL table I have a datatime column (the time is saved in the following format 2011-02-15 11:01:14 ). I extract this information with the PHP and print it to the user page.

$results = mysql_query($cmd,$link);
while ($res_array = mysql_fetch_array($results)) {
   $submitted_at = $res_array['datetime'];
   print $submitted_at."<br>";
}

However, I would like to show not only the given datatime, but also how long ago it was. In more detail, I need something like that: ( 67 day 4 hours 47 minutes 7 seconds ago ). Does PHP have some functions that can make it easier. In particular I bother with the fact that month could have 28, 29, 30 and 31 days.

As an alternative, I thought about doing it on the MySQL level. It should be easy to extract the number of second from the given time to the current data. Then I can easilly transform seconds into days, hours and minutes. But I do not know how can I access this information using the mysql_fetch_array . Should it be something like $res_array['unix_timestamp(now())-unix_timestamp(datatime)'] ?

Answer 1

This'll be what you're looking for just change the formatting to suit your needs.

http://php.net/manual/en/datetime.diff.php

For example:

<?php
$datetime1 = date_create('2009-10-11');
$datetime2 = date_create('2009-10-13');
$interval = date_diff($datetime1, $datetime2);
echo $interval->format('%R%a days');
?>

Change this line:

$interval->format('%R%a days')

Following guidelines from here:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

Edit: This function is PHP 5.3+

Edit2: Found this for older versions of PHP How to calculate the difference between two dates using PHP?