Loop between Two Dates in PHP

Submitted by admin on Friday, November 2, 2012 - 23:16.

There are times that you want to loop between two dates in PHP. If you have, for example, formatted the date like m/d/Y, you cannot simply use it in while loop statement.

Before you can loop between two dates in PHP, you need to convert it first to Unix timestamp using the strtotime function.

Here’s an example of how to do it:

$startDate = strtotime($checkin);
$endDate = strtotime($checkout);
 
while ($startDate < $endDate) {
        $startDate = strtotime('+1 day', $startDate);
        
        //add other code here
}

The example above is useful in many ways. Like for example, if you want to get the special price of rooms in a Hotel.

Say in November 15 – 16 the price per room is different. Take a look at the following record:


id  room_id date_from   date_to     price
1   1                               3200.00
5   1       7/8/2012    7/9/2012    3000.00
7   1       10/14/2012  10/27/2012  3100.00
4   1       11/15/2012  11/16/2012  4000.00

As you can see, a room have special price. So, in order to get the price based on the date a guest would like to reserved, you need to loop between the checkin and checkout date.