note 64046 deleted from function.date by peehaa

Note Submitter: mel dot boyce at gmail dot com ---- I've been flicking through the comments looking for some succinct date code and have noticed an alarming number of questions and over-burdened examples related to date mathematics. One of the most useful skills you can utilize when performing date math is taking full advantage of the UNIX timestamp. The UNIX timestamp was built for this kind of work. An example of this relates to a comment made by james at bandit-dot-co-dot-en-zed. James was looking for a way to calculate the number of days which have passed since a certain date. Rather than using mktime() and a loop, James can subtract the current timestamp from the timestamp of the date in question and divide that by the number of seconds in a day: <?php $days = floor((time() - strtotime("01-Jan-2006"))/86400); print("$days days have passed.\n"); ?> Another usage could find itself in a class submitted by Kyle M Hall which aids in the creation of timestamps from the recent past for use with MySQL. Rather than the looping and fine tuning of a date, Kyle can use the raw UNIX timestamps (this is untested code): <?php $ago = 14; // days $timestamp = time() - ($ago * 86400); ?> Hopefully these two examples of "UNIX-style" timestamp usage will help those finding date mathematics more elusive than it should be.