Generate incrementing date strings

Question

I need to generate a string of incrementing dates, something like this:

(year, month, day, hour, minute)
2010, 2, 12, 11, 30
2010, 2, 12, 11, 31
etc

Answer 1

Simplest that comes to my mind with PHP < 5.3

echo '(year, month, day, hour, minute)', PHP_EOL;
for($i = 0; $i < 1000; $i++) {
    echo date('Y, m, d, H, i', strtotime("+$i minute")), PHP_EOL;
}

Answer 2

I would suggest checking out PHP's built-in functions: date and mktime. Used together you can achieve what you want.

As an example to increment the day taken directly from the website.

<?php
$tomorrow  = mktime(0, 0, 0, date("m")  , date("d")+1, date("Y"));
?>

Answer 3

for($i=1;$i<=10;$i++){
 $tomorrow = mktime(0,0,0,date("m"),date("d")+$i,date("Y"));
 echo "Tomorrow is ".date("Y m d", $tomorrow);    
}

Answer 4

You can use the date classes (note: DateInterval and DatePeriod are only available as of PHP 5.3) to make life easy.

$start    = new DateTime('2010-02-12 11:30', new DateTimeZone('UTC'));
$interval = new DateInterval('PT1M'); // 1 minute interval
$period   = new DatePeriod($start, $interval, 100); // Run 100 times

foreach ($period as $datetime) {
    // Output like: 2009, 02, 12, 11, 30
    echo $datetime->format("Y, m, d, H, i") . PHP_EOL;
}

For a less pretty, but available in older versions of PHP, alternative then see the other suggestions recommending mktime.

Answer 5

<?PHP
    for ( $i = 0; $i < 1000; $i++ ) {
        $startTimeSec = mktime(11, 30 + $i, 0, 2, 12, 2010);
        echo date("Y, m, d, h, i", $startTimeSec) . "\n" . '<br />';
    }
?>