How to calculate hour intervals from two datetimes in PHP? - php

Question

I am creating an online booking system. when user clicks on a date in calendar, it returns two datetimes (start and end) for that date. I am trying to calculate all the hours from start to end which I was able to do, but I need to display the hours in intervals.
Lets say user has added available time tomorrow from 10.00-14.00 then I need to display the times like this:
10.00-11.00
11.00-12.00
12.00-13.00
13.00-14.00
for the specific day.
What I have so far.
public function getTimes()
{
$user_id = Input::get("id"); //get the user id
$selectedDay = Input::get('selectedDay'); // We get the data from AJAX for the day selected, then we get all available times for that day
$availableTimes = Nanny_availability::where('user_id', $user_id)->get();
// We will now create an array of all booking datetimes that belong to the selected day
// WE WILL NOT filter this in the query because we want to maintain compatibility with every database (ideally)
// For each available time...
foreach($availableTimes as $t => $value) {
$startTime = new DateTime($value->booking_datetime);
if ($startTime->format("Y-m-d") == $selectedDay) {
$endTime = new DateTime($value->booking_datetime);
date_add($endTime, DateInterval::createFromDateString('3600 seconds'));
// Try to grab any appointments between the start time and end time
$result = Nanny_bookings::timeBetween($startTime->format("Y-m-d H:i"), $endTime->format("Y-m-d H:i"));
// If no records are returned, the time is okay, if not, we must remove it from the array
if($result->first()) {
unset($availableTimes[$t]);
}
} else {
unset($availableTimes[$t]);
}
}
return response()->json($availableTimes);
}
How can I get the intervals?

Answer 1

Assuming the hour difference between start and end is 1 as per your question, you could use DateInterval and DatePeriod, to iterate over the times like:
$startDate = new DateTime( '2017-07-18 10:15:00' );
$endDate = new DateTime( '2017-07-18 14:15:00' );
$interval = new DateInterval('PT1H'); //interval of 1 hour
$daterange = new DatePeriod($startDate, $interval ,$endDate);
$times = [];
foreach($daterange as $date){
$times[] = $date->format("H:i") . " -- "
. $date->add(new DateInterval("PT1H"))->format("H:i");
}
echo "<pre>"; print_r($times);
//gives
Array
(
[0] => 10:15 -- 11:15
[1] => 11:15 -- 12:15
[2] => 12:15 -- 13:15
[3] => 13:15 -- 14:15
)
Update
You could use json_encode() in order to return the json times data, as:
$jsonTimes = json_encode($times);