Simplest way to increment a date in PHP?

Question

Say I have a string coming in, "2007-02-28", what's the simplest code I could write to turn that into "2007-03-01"? Right now I'm just using strtotime(), then adding 24*60*60, then using date(), but just wondering if there is a cleaner, simpler, or more clever way of doing it.

Solution 1

A clean way is to use strtotime()

$date = strtotime("+1 day", strtotime("2007-02-28"));
echo date("Y-m-d", $date);

Will give you the 2007-03-01

Solution 2

It's cleaner and simpler to add 86400. :)

The high-tech way is to do:

$date = new DateTime($input_date);
$date->modify('+1 day');
echo $date->format('Y-m-d');

but that's really only remotely worthwhile if you're doing, say, a sequence of transformations on the date, rather than just finding tomorrow.

Solution 3

You can do the addition right inside strtotime, e.g.

 $today="2007-02-28";
 $nextday=strftime("%Y-%m-%d", strtotime("$today +1 day"));

Solution 4

Another way is to use function mktime(). It is very useful function...

$date = "2007-02-28";
list($y,$m,$d)=explode('-',$date);
$date2 = Date("Y-m-d", mktime(0,0,0,$m,$d+1,$y));

but I think strtotime() is better in that situation...

Solution 5

The simplest way...

echo date('Y-m-d',strtotime("+1 day"));    //from today

OR from specified date...

echo date('Y-m-d',strtotime("+1 day", strtotime('2007-02-28')));

View more solutions

Comments

[davr]

Stupid CentOS only has PHP 5.1, and DateTime is introduced in 5.2. I guess I finally have to upgrade to an unofficial centos php package then.

[chaos]

Oh, neat. Didn't know that. It's almost like good old Date::Manip.

[Deva]

Er, no. Just adding 86400 is false simplicity.

[chaos]

Could you explain what you mean by that?

[Tom Haigh]

It is quite easy to understand what 24*60*60 means at a glance. 86400 less so.

[Tom Haigh]

nice, I didn't realise that mktime() would increment the month like that when you go over

[chaos]

Ah. I guess I've been doing this too long, then. 86400 is as recognizable to me as 65536.

[Deva]

@chaos: If your smallest unit of working time is a day, then you can usually get away with adding or substracting units of 86400. If it is smaller, you need to be aware of daylight savings and time zones. In which case, use the built-in functions. They will get it right more often than you will.

[Jimmy T.]

Not all days are 86400 seconds long (leap seconds).

[Eatsleeprace Livelife]

/("1month")= will increment by month. //("1day")= will increment by day. //(date("Y-m-d"))=start to increment date on you current date.

[astidham2003]

You should edit your answer to include the explanation of the code, instead of having the explanation in a comment.