如何将日期与值进行比较？ PHP

Question

I am currently working on a project. I'm suposed to compare a date from my database and the curent date. If the curent date is bigger than the date from the database i am suposed to cound how many times the duration of the item fits in the database date till its bigger than the curent date.

All i got is the curent date, the duration of the item and the date in the database.

What i did befor was use this while loop:

while(date('Y-m-d') > $value->start) {
    $value->start= date('Y-m-d', strtotime("+" . $value->contractDuration . " months", strtotime($value->start)));
};

But i'm not allowed to use a while loop. Any clue how to get the same result?

Answer 1

I quite like using DateTime and the use of date_diff for this:

<?php

$databaseDate = new DateTime("2018-01-02");
$today = new DateTime();

if($today > $databaseDate){
    echo date_diff($today, $databaseDate)->format("%a")." days";

}

Will output 160 days.

https://3v4l.org/3FfKp

If you want months, replace %a with %m