PHP adding exact weekdays to a timestamp - php

Question

I want to add an x number of week days (e.g. 48 weekday hours) to the current timestamp. I am trying to do this using the following
echo (strtotime('2 weekdays');
However, this doesn't seem to take me an exact 48 hours ahead in time. For example, inputting the current server time of Tuesday 18/03/2014 10:47 returns Thursday 20/03/2014 00:00. using the following function:
echo (strtotime('2 weekdays')-mktime())/86400;
It can tell that it's returning only 1.3 weekdays from now.
Why is it doing this? Are there any existing functions which allow an exact amount of weekday hours?

Answer 1

Given you want to preserve the weekdays functionality and not loose the hours, minutes and seconds, you could do this:
$now = new DateTime();
$hms = new DateInterval(
'PT'.$now->format('H').'H'.
$now->format('i').'M'.
$now->format('s').'S'.
);
$date = new DateTime('2 weekdays');
$date->add($hms);//add hours here again
The reason why weekday doesn't add the hours is because, if you add 1 weekday at any point in time on a monday, the next weekday has to be tuesday.
The hour simply does not matter. Say your date is 2014-01-02 12:12:12, and you want the next weekday, that day starts at 2014-01-03 00:00:00, so that's what you get.
My last solution works though, and here's how: I use the $now instance of DateTime, and its format method to construct a DateInterval format string, to be passed to the constructor. An interval format is quite easy: it starts with P, for period, then a digit and a char to indicate what that digit represents: 1Y for 1 Year, and 2D for 2 Days.
However, we're only interested in hours, minutes and seconds. Actual time, which is indicated using a T in the interval format string, hence we start the string with PT (Period Time).
Using the format specifiers H, i and s, we construct an interval format that in the case of 12:12:12 looks like this:
$hms = new DateInterval(
'PT12H12M12S'
);
Then, it's a simple matter of calling the DateTime::add method to add the hours, minutes and seconds to our date + weekdays:
$weekdays = new DateTime('6 weekdays');
$weekdays->add($hms);
echo $weekdays->format('Y-m-d H:i:s'), PHP_EOL;
And you're there.
Alternatively, you could just use the basic same trick to compute the actual day-difference between your initial date, and that date + x weekdays, and then add that diff to your initial date. It's the same basic principle, but instead of having to create a format like PTXHXMXS, a simple PXD will do.
Working example here
I'd urge you to use the DateInterface classes, as it is more flexible, allows for type-hinting to be used and makes dealing with dates just a whole lot easier for all of us. Besides, it's not too different from your current code:
$today = new DateTime;
$tomorrow = new DateTime('tomorrow');
$dayAfter = new DateTime('2 days');
In fact, it's a lot easier if you want to do frequent date manipulations on a single date:
$date = new DateTime();//or DateTime::createFromFormat('Y-m-d H:i:s', $dateString);
$diff = new DateInterval('P2D');//2 days
$date->add($diff);
echo $date->format('Y-m-d H:i:s'), PHP_EOL, 'is the date + 2 days', PHP_EOL;
$date->sub($diff);
echo $date->format('Y-m-d H:i:s'), PHP_EOL, 'was the original date, now restored';
Easy, once you've spent some time browsing through the docs

Answer 2

I think I have found a solution. It's primitive but after some quick testing it seems to work.
The function calculates the time passed since midnight of the current day, and adds it onto the date returned by strtotime. Since this could fall into a weekend day, I've checked and added an extra day or two accordingly.
function weekDays($days) {
$tstamp = (strtotime($days.' weekdays') + (time() - strtotime("today")));
if(date('D',$tstamp) == 'Sat') {
$tstamp = $tstamp + 86400*2;
}
elseif(date('D',$tstamp) == 'Sun') {
$tstamp = $tstamp + 86400;
}
return $tstamp;
}

Answer 3

Function strtotime('2 weekdays') seems to add 2 weekdays to the current date without the time.
If you want to add 48 hours why not adding 2*24*60*60 to mktime()?
echo(date('Y-m-d', mktime()+2*24*60*60));

Answer 4

The currently accepted solution works, but it will fail when you want to add weekdays to a timestamp that is not now. Here's a simpler snippet that will work for any given point in time:
$start = new DateTime('2021-09-29 15:12:10');
$start->add(date_interval_create_from_date_string('+ 3 weekdays'));
echo $start->format('Y-m-d H:i:s'); // 2021-10-04 15:12:10
Note that this will also work for a negative amount of weekdays:
$start = new DateTime('2021-09-29 15:12:10');
$start->add(date_interval_create_from_date_string('- 3 weekdays'));
echo $start->format('Y-m-d H:i:s'); // 2021-09-24 15:12:10