How to generate a date range with PHP
From time to time I need to loop through a date range. One approach is to
generate a start date and an end date and then add 1 day to the start date until
it reaches the end date (or whatever interval you want to increment by). This
works wonders thanks to strtotime:
$start = '2014-12-07';
$end = '2014-12-31';
while ($start <= $end) {
// Do something with the date here...
// Increment the date
$start = strtotime($start . ' +1 day');
}
If you wanted to do this in a more object-oriented way, and you are using PHP
5.3+, you can leverage the DatePeriod class. Combined with the DateTime and
DateInterval classes you are able to achieve this:
$start = new DateTime('2014-12-07');
$end = new DateTime('2014-12-31');
$range = new DatePeriod($start, new DateInterval('P1D'), $end);
foreach ($range as $date) {
// Do something with the date here...
}
The code's a bit shorter but is probably more memory intensive due to the use of objects. Like most things in PHP-land, the choice is yours based on how you want to implement things. Got another way to generate a date range? Comment below!