How to Round Minutes Down to the Nearest Quarter Hour in PHP?

Rounding Minutes Down to the Nearest Quarter Hour in PHP

In this programming query, we explore a prevalent problem faced by PHP developers: rounding times down to the nearest quarter hour. The task involves fetching datetime data from a MySQL database in the format "2010-03-18 10:50:00" and converting it to quarter-hour intervals.

To achieve this, we can leverage the concept of rounding down. Traditionally, we might consider using the floor() function to truncate values. However, for this specific requirement, we employ a slightly different approach.

In our code, we capture the current time using the time() function and store it in the $seconds variable. Subsequently, we calculate the rounded time by dividing $seconds by the number of seconds in a quarter hour (15 * 60). This yields the rounded time in seconds.

Next, we apply a rounding operation using either round() or floor() based on our specific requirements. round() is used for general rounding, while floor() ensures rounding down. The result is assigned to the $rounded_seconds variable.

Finally, we utilize the date() function to convert the original and rounded times to a readable format with hours and minutes. By printing these values, we can visualize how effectively our code rounds down the input time to the nearest quarter hour interval.

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