Building a weekly dropdown with php - php

Question

I have reports i run, they are based on weekly reports from Wed - Tue each week example here:
else if($_GET['week'] =='aug13th2014'){
$date_from = "2014-08-13 00:00:00";
$date_to = "2014-08-19 23:59:59";
$date_display = "Aug 13th to Aug 19th 2014";
}
Then i echo the select
echo "<option value='aug13th2014'>Aug 13th to Aug 19th 2014</option>";
So if a user selects that week and submits the form, then it uses the $date_from and $date_to to run my reports and return the values for that week.
This all works great but its a pain in the butt to have to manually create those else if statements every single week and if i am not concentrating then i can make mistakes on the date values.
What i want to do is automate it. So im thinking ill use a script that does the following:
Note that even though i say from wednesday to tuesday its officially
Get Todays Date
Find the date for the previous Wednesday
Check if 168 hours (7 days) has elapsed since Wed at 00:00:00
If not then find the previous Wednesday and then get the date for 168 hours after that point.
This will give me 2 dates now. Wed 13th Aug 2014 and ill set the time to 00:00:00 and then ill also have the date for Tuesday 19th Aug.
Then ill decide how many weeks i want to show in the dropdown and loop that many times
Then i will need to deduct 168 hours from both wednesday and tuesdays date in the next loop to get the previous week.
Repeat that for however many loops i get
My question is before i got to all that hassle is there a more efficient way to do this? Maybe a php class available for this very type of problem? I am not using any frameworks and its not worth converting just for this job. Also are there any obvious flaws in my approach or it looks good?
One of my concerns is handling Daylight Savings Time where the time goes back and forward one hour, i guess i could manually change it twice a year but maybe there is a simpler solution

Answer 1

The PHP function strtotime can help you here.
echo strtotime('Last Wednesday');
I wouldn't do:
echo "<option value='aug13th2014'>Aug 13th to Aug 19th 2014</option>";
Rather use a timestamp so code your dropdown like so:
$date = strtotime('Last Wednesday');
$weeks = 5;
$i = 1;
echo '<select>';
while ($i <= $weeks) {
echo '<option value="'.$date.'">Week of ' . date('D d M', $date) . '</option>';
$date = strtotime( date('Y-m-d', $date) . ' + 7 Days');
$i++;
}
echo '</select>';