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!

How to generate a date range with PHP

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