Grabbing information between 2 dates in php - php

Question

I have an array that looks something like this
$data =
[
[
'date' => '2020-10-01',
'product' => 'Product 1',
'description' => 'Product 1',
],
[
'date' => '2020-11-01',
'product' => 'Product 2',
'description' => 'Product 2',
],
[
'date' => '2020-12-01',
'product' => 'Product 3',
'description' => 'Product 3',
],
[
'date' => '2021-01-01',
'product' => 'Product 4',
'description' => 'Product 4',
]
];
And what I would like to do is grab all the information between 2 dates.
For example I want everything between 2021-01-01 and 2020-11-01 and it would then display Product 2, Product 3 and Product 4
I'm not sure how to go about this

Answer 1

<?php
$data =
[
[
'date' => '2020-10-01',
'product' => 'Product 1',
'description' => 'Product 1',
],
[
'date' => '2020-11-01',
'product' => 'Product 2',
'description' => 'Product 2',
],
[
'date' => '2020-12-01',
'product' => 'Product 3',
'description' => 'Product 3',
],
[
'date' => '2021-01-01',
'product' => 'Product 4',
'description' => 'Product 4',
]
];
$from = new DateTime('2020-11-11');
$to = new DateTime('2030-10-13');
foreach ($data as $d){
$productDate = new DateTime($d['date']);
if (($productDate >= $from) && ($productDate <= $to)){
echo "is between";
var_dump($d);
}
}

Answer 2

In case you want to do this in PHP you can create a similar function to SQL's WHERE ... BETWEEN ... AND ... using array_filter.
If you have access to the SQL query then probably you want to have the DBMS take care of this as #RiggsFolly mentioned in the comments.
$lowerBound = strtotime('2020-11-01');
$upperBound = strtotime('2021-01-01');
$result = array_filter($data, function ($item) use ($lowerBound, $upperBound) {
$itemDate = strtotime($item['date']);
return $lowerBound <= $itemDate && $itemDate <= $upperBound;
});
echo '<pre>';
print_r($result);
echo '</pre>';

Answer 3

As per the comments if the data is originally sourced from a database query it's a much better idea to limit the content there, for example:
// SQL query to be used in a prepared statement
SELECT date, product, description
FROM products
WHERE date >= ?
AND date <= ?
However, failing that, the key thing here is that the dates are all properly formatted: timetamps follow the pattern Y-m-d which means that both the chronological and alphabetical order are the same
Generally...
Start ===> End
A ===> Z
1 ===> 10
0000-00-00 ===> 9999-99-99
Which means...
2020-12-30 < 2020-12-31 < 2021-01-01
That being the case when we compare two properly formatted dates (in the same format) we have no need to alter the data type/format; converting the string with DateTime or strtotime adds nothing except ~10x the required time compared to comparing the values in string format.
Anyway, comparing the dates:
Using array_filter
$minDate = '2020-11-01';
$maxDate = '2021-01-01';
$result = array_filter($data, function ($item) use ($minDate, $maxDate) {
return $minDate <= $item["date"] && $item["date"] <= $maxDate;
});
Using foreach
$minDate = '2020-11-01';
$maxDate = '2021-01-01';
$result = [];
foreach($data as $item){
if($minDate <= $item["date"] && $item["date"] <= $maxDate){
$result[] = $item;
}
}