Lumen data store as hours minute and second format - php

Question

I'm using Lumen to build an API. At first, I want to explain my work a little
bit. My API will provide an content to a user. The user will record the content
and submit it with audio length. (EX: 1min. 22 sec.)
I just store it in my
database. when the user wants to see how many hours he recorded I will return
the total time. okay... that's why i was created a table column
$table->decimal('audio_length');
and store it how user sends request. when the user wants to see the total
time my code will work like:
$point = PointSpeech::where('user_id', Auth::user()->id)->get();
$total_point = 0;
foreach ($point as $value) {
$total_point += $value->points_pending;
}
return response()->json(['status'=> 'Success', 'point_pending' => $total_point], 200);
yeah I know it's a stupid way. Now I looking for a better way to show it as
Hour, Minute and Second. hi, can you guys help me...? please...?

Answer 1

When you're storing the duration in this way, you should always convert to the smallest unit you want to record. In your case, if you don't care about milliseconds (or smaller), you should convert the time given by the user to seconds e.g. 1 minute 22 seconds, would be 82 seconds.
This is the number you should store in the database. If you do care about smaller units such as milliseconds, then that is what you should store in the database. Store an integer value.
Now when pulling your information out of the database, you can do a simple SUM to get the total number of seconds (or milliseconds) and convert that back to display to the user.
Converting to hours, minutes and seconds should be easy enough to do once you have an integer representing seconds. As an example:
$seconds = 176; // This would come from your database query
echo (new DateTime('#0'))
->diff(new DateTime("#$seconds"))
->format('%h hours, %i minutes and %s seconds');