PHP Calculate total days remaining via MySQL

Question

My MySQL structure:

startdate
2012-01-01 04:00:00
enddate
2012-12-05 21:55:00

My PHP

$startDate=row['startdate'];
$endDate=row['enddate]';

$days="";
$days=date("Y-m-d H:i:s");
$days=($startDate-$endDate);
echo $days;

Answer 1

Try this simple one-liner:

<?php
    echo round((strtotime($row['enddate'])-strtotime($row['startdate']))/86400);
?>

You could have a look in the PHP manual for strtotime() at http://php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php .

Answer 2

1. Why not use DATE_DIFF, a built-in, MySQL function?
2. If you want to stick with PHP: first use strtotime() on both dates (convert to unix timestamp), then subtract, then format.

Answer 3

You could use the strtotime() function to convert the start and end dates into seconds, subtract the start date from the end date, then use a bit of maths to convert seconds into days, and finally round off with the number of days with the floor() function. Here is a bit of code that I have written and tested.

<?php
$startDate = row['startdate'];
$endDate = row['enddate]';
$seconds_left = (strtotime($endDate) - strtotime($startDate));
$days_left = floor($seconds_left / 3600 / 24);
echo $days_left;
?>