I am experiencing a rather strange problem using PHP 5.3's date diff function to calculate the difference in days between two dates. Below is my code:
$currentDate = new DateTime(); // (today's date is 2012-1-27)
$startDate = new DateTime('2012-04-01');
$diff = $startDate->diff($currentDate);
$daysBefore = $diff->d;
echo $daysBefore;
The above code displays 4 as the value of the $daysBefore variable.
Why is PHP displaying a difference of 4 days between the dates 27th Jan 2012 and 1st April 2012, when clearly there are many more days between these dates.
Am I doing something wrong?
DateInterval::$d
is the days part of the interval, not the total number of days of the difference. For that, you want DateInterval::$days
, so:
$daysBefore = $diff->days;