How to find the difference between two dates in php?

If you were given two dates, that is start date and end date and You want to find the difference between two dates in PHP.

Its very simple and easy to calculate the difference between two dates.

There are two methods to find the difference.

By using date_diff() in-built function to Calculate Difference Between Two Dates in PHP

For  php version >=5.3  : Create two date objects and then use  date_diff()  function. It will return php  DateInterval  object.

$date1 = date_create("2018-03-24");

echo "Start date: ".$date1->format("Y-m-d")."<br>";

$date2 = date_create("2019-05-31");

echo "End date: ".$date2->format("Y-m-d")."<br>";

$diff = date_diff($date1,$date2);

echo "Difference between start date and end date: ".$diff->format("%y years, %m months and %d days");
  
 

Output by using date_diff() function

If you execute the above code to find the difference between start date and end date,  you will get the below output

Start date: 2018-03-24

End date: 2019-05-31

Difference between start date and end date: 1 years, 2 months and 7 days

By using strtotime() function in PHP

You can use  strtotime()  to convert two dates to unix time and then calculate the number of seconds between them. From this it’s rather easy to calculate difference between start date and end date.

$date1 = "2018-03-24";

$date2 = "2019-05-31";
$diff = abs(strtotime($date2) - strtotime($date1));
$years = floor($diff / (365*60*60*24));

$months = floor(($diff - $years * 365*60*60*24) / (30*60*60*24));

$days = floor(($diff - $years * 365*60*60*24 - $months*30*60*60*24)/ (60*60*24));
printf("%d years, %d months, %d days\n", $years, $months, $days);

Output by using strtotime() function

If you execute the above code to find the difference between start date and end date using strtotime() function,  you will get the below output

1 years, 2 months, 8 days

That’s it. I hope you will like this tutorial. Please share this post with your friends in your social media by clicking share options. Please share your feedback via comments

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