Calculate the difference between date/times in PHP

Question

I have a Date object ( from Pear) and want to subtract another Date object to get the time difference in seconds.

I have tried a few things but the first just gave

Answer 1

Maybe some folks wanna have the time difference the facebook way. It tells you "one minute ago", or "2 days ago", etc... Here is my code:

function getTimeDifferenceToNowString($timeToCompare) {

        // get current time
        $currentTime = new Date();
        $currentTimeInSeconds = strtotime($currentTime);
        $timeToCompareInSeconds = strtotime($timeToCompare);

        // get delta between $time and $currentTime
        $delta = $currentTimeInSeconds - $timeToCompareInSeconds;

        // if delta is more than 7 days print the date
        if ($delta > 60 * 60 * 24 *7 ) {
            return $timeToCompare;
        }   

        // if delta is more than 24 hours print in days
        else if ($delta > 60 * 60 *24) {
            $days = $delta / (60*60 *24);
            return $days . " days ago";
        }

        // if delta is more than 60 minutes, print in hours
        else if ($delta > 60 * 60){
            $hours = $delta / (60*60);
            return $hours . " hours ago";
        }

        // if delta is more than 60 seconds print in minutes
        else if ($delta > 60) {
            $minutes = $delta / 60;
            return $minutes . " minutes ago";
        }

        // actually for now: if it is less or equal to 60 seconds, just say it is a minute
        return "one minute ago";

    }