Generating Time Ranges (PHP Cookbook)

3.15. Generating Time Ranges

3.15.1. Problem

You need to know all the days in a week or a month. For example, you want to print out a list of appointments for a week.

3.15.2. Solution

Identify your start date using time( ) and strftime( ). If your interval has a fixed length, you can loop through that many days. If not, you need to test each subsequent day for membership in your desired range.

For example, a week has seven days, so you can use a fixed loop to generate all the days in the current week:

// generate a time range for this week
$now = time();

// If it's before 3 AM, increment $now, so we don't get caught by DST
// when moving back to the beginning of the week
if (3 < strftime('%H', $now)) { $now += 7200; }

// What day of the week is today?
$today = strftime('%w', $now);

// How many days ago was the start of the week?
$start_day = $now - (86400 * $today);

// Print out each day of the week
for ($i = 0; $i < 7; $i++) {
  print strftime('%c',$start_day + 86400 * $i);
}

3.15.3. Discussion

A particular month or year could have a variable number of days, so you need to compute the end of the time range based on the specifics of that month or year. To loop through every day in a month, find the epoch timestamps for the first day of the month and the first day of the next month. The loop variable, $day is incremented a day at a time (86400 seconds) until it's no longer less than the epoch timestamp at the beginning of the next month:

// Generate a time range for this month
$now = time();

// If it's before 3 AM, increment $now, so we don't get caught by DST
// when moving back to the beginning of the month
if (3 < strftime('%H', $now)) { $now += 7200; }

// What month is this?
$this_month = strftime('%m',$now);

// Epoch timestamp for midnight on the first day of this month
$day = mktime(0,0,0,$this_month,1);
// Epoch timestamp for midnight on the first day of next month
$month_end = mktime(0,0,0,$this_month+1,1);

while ($day < $month_end) {
  print strftime('%c',$day); 
  $day += 86400;
}

3.15.4. See Also

Documentation on time( ) at http://www.php.net/time and strftime( ) at http://www.php.net/strftime.