Calculate total seconds in PHP DateInterval

What is the best way to calculate the total number of seconds between two dates? So far, I’ve tried something along the lines of:

$delta   = $date->diff(new DateTime('now'));
$seconds = $delta->days * 60 * 60 * 24;

However, the days property of the DateInterval object seems to be broken in the current PHP5.3 build (at least on Windows, it always returns the same 6015 value). I also attempted to do it in a way which would fail to preserve number of days in each month (rounds to 30), leap years, etc:

$seconds = ($delta->s)
         + ($delta->i * 60)
         + ($delta->h * 60 * 60)
         + ($delta->d * 60 * 60 * 24)
         + ($delta->m * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30)
         + ($delta->y * 60 * 60 * 24 * 365);

But I’m really not happy with using this half-assed solution.

Answer

Could you not compare the time stamps instead?

$now = new DateTime('now');
$diff = $date->getTimestamp() - $now->getTimestamp()

Advertisement

Answer