将变量字符串添加到datetime，例如。 2周

Question

is it possible to add a variable string like '2 day, 2 weeks or even 4 hours' to a date time in PHP.

For example:

I have a date time like this: '2017-08-02 12:00' now the user choose an interval like '4 hours or 2 weeks' now the user choice should be added to the date time.

Is this possible?

I don't want the whole code, maybe just an advice how to do that.

thanks

Answer 1

Yes, use

$userDate = strtotime('2017-08-02 12:00:00');

echo date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime('+4 hours', $userDate));

to get date after 4 hours

Example

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Explanation

strtotime converts about any English textual datetime description into a Unix timestamp. Most commonly it's used with actual date string or with difference string. E.g. +5 months, 'next Monday' and so on. It will return Unix timestamp - integer that represents how much seconds there is after 1970-01-01 (1970-01-01 00:00:00 is 0, 1970-01-01 00:01:00 is 60 and so on).

So in strtotime('2017-08-02 12:00:00') we convert date to integer for later use.

strtotime('+4 hours', $userDate) - here we use our date as "now" parameter (by default it's time()) and requesting to return timestamp after 4 hours.

echo date('Y-m-d H:i:s', ...); - date accepts format and Unix timestamp to convert from integer back to human readable text.