php - Time remaining until specific time from current time of page load

Question

I have to admit that having not even tried to code this myself this question may be a annoying to some but I'm very surprised that I wasn't able to find a good example on the web of what I'm trying to do. Perhaps I'm just not using the right key words in my searches.

I am trying to calculate the time remaining from now (the time the page loads) until a specific date and time (let's say Wednesday May 11, 2011 12:00PM for example) and display it. I had thought it would be quite easy to find a snippet to accomplish this but no luck so far. Does anyone have some example code they have used to accomplish this before? I don't expect anyone to write this for me from scratch but if I can at least get pointed in the right direction it would be extremely helpful.

Answer 1

I'd use the DateInterval and DateTime functions:

$now = new DateTime();
$future_date = new DateTime('2011-05-11 12:00:00');

$interval = $future_date->diff($now);

echo $interval->format("%a days, %h hours, %i minutes, %s seconds");

You'll need a version of PHP that's at least 5.3 to do it this way - otherwise, do what helloandre recommends.