formatting mysql timestamp in php, with several conditions - php

Question

I'm trying to format a SQL timestamp in PHP based on the following conditions, but can't figure out how. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
If the timestamp was TODAY, display as 4:15PM or 12:30AM
If the timestamp was before TODAY but in the past 7 DAYS, list as 'Sunday' or 'Monday'
If the timestamp was before 7 DAYS ago, list as 'mm/dd/yy'
How would I go about that?

Answer 1

First you need to convert the MySQL time to a unix timestamp which is what most of php date functions use. If you are using MySQLs DateTime type, you can perform the conversion in SQL with the MySQL function unix_timestamp() mysql date functions. Or you can convert the mysql date to a unix timestamp in PHP with the strtotime($mysqlDateTime) function php strtotime function
once you have the unix timestamp of the time you would like to format, the conversion would look something like this (86400 is number of seconds in 24 hours):
function displayDate($timestamp)
{
$secAgo = time() - $timestamp;
// 1 day
if ($secAgo < 86400)
return date('h:i:A', $timestamp);
// 1 week
if ($secAgo < (86400 * 7))
return date('l', $timestamp);
// older than 1 week
return date('m/t/y', $timestamp);
}
This method has the benefit of not requiring extra object creation in PHP (a tad slow) or performing unnecessary calculations on the SQL server. It might also help to know that MySQL's timestamp type stores data as a unix timestamp (number of seconds since Jan 1 1970) value requiring only 32bits for storage compared to datetime which uses 64bits of storage. 32 bits should be enough for everyone, until 2038 or something....

Answer 2

you can check date difference by by diff() of PHP or by msql datediff()
http://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.diff.php
Then check difference is zero or equal to 1 or greater than 7
h 12-hour format of an hour with leading zeros 01 through 12 date('H:i:s')
i Minutes with leading zeros 00 to 59
s Seconds, with leading zeros 00 through 59
G 24-hour format of an hour without leading zeros 0 through 23
USE DATE(G) to find AM or PM
if($TODAY)
date('h:i:s')PM
ELSE IF ($THISWEEK)
l (lowercase 'L') A
full textual representation of the day of the week Sunday through Saturday
ELSE IF($BEFOREONEWEEK)
date('d-m-y')
http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php
This should work. Hope so :-)

Answer 3

You just have to use a conditional:
$now = new DateTime("now");
$ystrday = new DateTime("yesterday");
$weekAgo = new DateTime("now")->sub(new DateInterval('P7D'));
$inputDate = new DateTime(whenever);
if($yesterday < $inputDate and $inputDate < $now){
$outDate = date('g:ia', $inputDate->getTimestamp() );
}else if($weekAgo < $inputDate and $inputDate < $now){
$outDate = date('l', $inputDate->getTimestamp() );
}else if($inputDate < $weekAgo){
$outDate = date('d/m/y', $inputDate->getTimestamp() );
}
This hasn't been tested and you'll need to get your mySql date into a php DateTime object but it should get you pretty close.

Answer 4

I assume you're talking about the MySQL TIMESTAMP datatype, since I don't think MySQL actually has a datatype like a Unix timestamp (i.e. seconds since epoch), so you'll have to first convert the date you get using the strtotime function:
$timestamp = strtotime($dbTimestamp);
This will return a Unix timestamp you can play with.
Next we'll define a couple more timestamps to compare this value against:
First, we want to know the timestamp for midnight this morning. For that, you'll pass the string "today" to strtotime:
$today = strtotime("today");
Next, we need to know the timestamp for seven days ago. You'll have to choose between "1 week ago" and "1 week ago midnight". The difference between these two is that midnight will return the timestamp for 12am on that day, while the version without it will return the current time, seven days ago (e.g. today, the difference would be that midnight will return 12 AM on April 7 and the non-midnight version would, right now, return 3:45PM on April 7):
$weekAgo = strtotime("1 week ago midnight");
(Note, there are many formats that strtotime understands, including many relative formats like the "today" and "1 week ago" examples used above.)
Next, we need to define the date formats to use in each case:
$timeOnly = "g:i A"; // This gives an "hour:minute AM/PM" format, e.g. "6:42 PM"
$dayOfWeek = "l" // Gives a full-word day of the week, e.g. "Sunday"
$mdy = "m/d/Y" // gives two-digit month and day, and 4-digit year,
// separated by slashes, e.g. "04/14/2011"
Finally, we just do our comparisons, and format our timestamp using the date function:
if ($timestamp >= $today) {
$date = date($timeOnly, $timestamp);
} elseif ($timestamp >= $weekAgo) {
$date = date($dayOfWeek, $timestamp);
} else {
$date = date($mdy, $timestamp);
}
This will leave you with a string variable called $date which contains your database-provided timestamp in the appropriate format, which you can display on your page as needed.