How to Add Two Date Intervals in PHP to Find Total Time Duration?

How to add two date ranges in PHP

Adding two date ranges to calculate the total hour and minute duration is a problem for many Questions for PHP programmers. Let's try to understand how to do this.

Problem Description

The user wants to add two date intervals in the following way to get the total duration in hour and minute format:

<code class="php">$a = new DateTime('14:25');
$b = new DateTime('17:30');
$interval1 = $a->diff($b);
echo "interval 1 : " . $interval1->format("%H:%I");
echo "<br />";

$c = new DateTime('08:00');
$d = new DateTime('13:00');
$interval2 = $c->diff($d);
echo "interval 2 : " . $interval2->format("%H:%I");
echo "<br />";

echo "Total interval : " . ($interval1 + $interval2);</code>

Question Answers

PHP does not have operator overloading, so when adding objects with objects, PHP will first try to convert them to strings, but DateInterval does not support this operation.

To solve this problem, we need to use another method:

1. Create a new DateTime object: Create a new DateTime object to use as a reference point.
2. Use the add function to add an interval: Use the add function to add two intervals to a new DateTime object.
3. Show the difference from the reference point: Finally, show the difference between the new DateTime object and the reference point to get the total duration.

Code Example

Here is a code example using the above method:

<code class="php">$a = new DateTime('14:25');
$b = new DateTime('17:30');
$interval1 = $a->diff($b);
echo "interval 1: " . $interval1->format("%H:%I") . "\n";

$c = new DateTime('08:00');
$d = new DateTime('13:00');
$interval2 = $c->diff($d);
echo "interval 2: " . $interval2->format("%H:%I") . "\n";

$e = new DateTime('00:00');
$f = clone $e;
$e->add($interval1);
$e->add($interval2);
echo "Total interval : " . $f->diff($e)->format("%H:%I") . "\n";</code>

Output:

interval 1: 03:05
interval 2: 05:00
Total interval : 08:05

Alternative approach (custom DateInterval)

If you want to go deeper, you can also consider creating your own DateInterval extension and redefining the addition operation. This is a more advanced approach that requires a deep understanding of PHP extension development.

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