PHP Countdown to Date

Question

How could set a date and get a countdown in PHP? For example if I set the date as 3 December 2PM it would tell me how many days and hours are remaining.

No need for

Answer 1

It's not as trivial as subtracting strtotime() results, since there are daylight savings and time would be mathematically correct, but not physically. Anyway, for these purposes you should use gmdate() function, which has no daylight savings:

$date = gmdate('U', strtotime('2009-12-03 14:00'));

// Get difference between both dates without DST
$diff = $date - gmdate('U');
// Days (in last day it will be zero)
$diff_days = floor($remaining / (24 * 60 * 60));
// Hours (in the last hour will be zero)
$diff_hours = floor($remaining % (24 * 60 * 60) / 3600);