PHP Function to return the number of days between two dates

<?php

function dateDiff($start, $end) {

$start_ts = strtotime($start);

$end_ts = strtotime($end);

$diff = $end_ts - $start_ts;

return round($diff / 86400);

}

echo dateDiff("2006-04-05", "2006-04-01");

?>

[Edit] – Thanks Joel for pointing out the bug mentioned in the comments bellow :-)

~ by Richard@Home on March 28, 2006.

Posted in Uncategorized

18 Responses to “PHP Function to return the number of days between two dates”

  1. Awesome! I read so many sites that did this in 100+ lines of code… I expected it to be built in to PHP. Thanks Richard!

    David said this on May 25, 2007 at 6:34 am

  2. Simple and work! Thanks!

    Przemek said this on March 27, 2008 at 10:14 am

  3. Super function, thanks dude:)

    Claudiu said this on April 10, 2008 at 5:36 am

  4. Nice, clean code. Thanks!

    Joel said this on April 11, 2008 at 7:50 am

  5. Hi again. At first your script seemed perfect, but after some testing I found a bug. Your script doesn’t seem to know about March 31th.. Try to run this:

    echo dateDiff(“2008-03-29″, “2008-03-30″) . “”;
    echo dateDiff(“2008-03-29″, “2008-03-31″) . “”;
    echo dateDiff(“2008-03-29″, “2008-04-01″) . “”;
    echo dateDiff(“2008-03-29″, “2008-04-02″) . “”;

    I can’t figure out what’s wrong.

    Joel said this on April 11, 2008 at 10:46 am

  6. Sorry about spaming, but I think I found the problem and a solution =)

    For some reason the script doesn’t give an integer for some dates. Instead you get a number like this: 2.95833333333. When you use floor() you get 2 days instead of 3. When I tried round() instead everything seems to work.

    Thanks again for this script!

    Joel said this on April 11, 2008 at 10:59 am

  7. Thanks for the update Joel. I’ll update the code to reflect your suggestion and give you a credit :)

    Richard@Home said this on April 11, 2008 at 1:58 pm

  8. Was looking for a quick snippet to do this… good job and thanks.

    Jay said this on September 13, 2008 at 7:51 pm

  9. hi. 1 question from me. i need to print everyday between 2 date. then what should i do?

    Khangai said this on November 7, 2008 at 6:25 am

  10. Is it possible to add some functionality to this to exclude weekend days? I’m developing a holiday request app so don’t want to include Saturday and Sunday in the calculation of the days requested. Thanks!

    Lfcfan said this on November 12, 2008 at 11:28 am

  11. This is great, but I think there is a rounding problem. You need to do:

    return round(($diff / 86400) + 0.5);

    Otherwise things seem to be off by a day when it’s after noon.

    Chris said this on February 11, 2009 at 6:51 pm

  12. Thanks . This is very useful

    Sheeja said this on March 19, 2009 at 6:55 am

  13. $dateDiff = round((strtotime(”2008-03-29″) – strtotime(“2008-03-30″))/ 86400);

    George said this on March 23, 2009 at 3:52 pm

  14. Great function. It solve my one issue

    Rajan Pratap Singh said this on April 8, 2009 at 4:45 am

  15. Nice post…thanks lot

    seo free said this on May 13, 2009 at 2:42 pm

  16. Any chance for help on leap years???

    Ben Crowther said this on July 14, 2009 at 3:22 pm

  17. What do you need help with on leap years? Since you’re converting to Unix timestamps with strtotime(), it handles it internally

    Scott said this on August 2, 2009 at 7:24 am

  18. hey man, thanx for the function, really usefull.

    Desarrollo Web said this on September 8, 2009 at 8:12 pm

Leave a Reply