elapsedTimeStr issues / limitations

[adrianbj]

Short description of the issue

A few things - it feels weird to me that if I try to exclude hours, all of a sudden, minutes starts showing up, so I have to exclude hours, minutes, and seconds.

I also think this function really needs months and years options to be useful

Optional: Screenshots/Links that demonstrate the issue

Your screenshots/links go here.

[klor]

Also:

1. It would be more logical and natural to specify what you want to output (as opposed to what you don't want to output).

• Current: $datetime->elapsedTimeStr( $p->date_from, $p->date_to, true, ['exclude'=>['seconds', 'minutes', 'hours', 'days', 'weeks']] );
• Better: $datetime->elapsedTimeStr( $p->date_from, $p->date_to, true, ['return'=>['year', 'month'] );

2. Return value might be a timestamp (optional <- if all I want is to calculate diff between two dates; as an alternative to PHPs date_diff that is hard to easy to use)

[klor]

@adrianbj, @ryancramerdesign: You may find this function useful (feel free to use it in any way):
https://gist.github.com/klor/d5c63697374619fcfbd98340627afa09

Brgds, SwimToWin

[matjazpotocnik]

@ryancramerdesign, while the function is working as documented, some improvements can be made. But I discovered that singular/plural is not performing as expected:

d($datetime->elapsedTimeStr(strtotime('2023-01-01 01:01.01'),strtotime('2023-01-02 02:02.02')));

returns:

'1 days 1 hours 1 minutes 1 seconds'

It should be:

'1 day 1 hour 1 minute 1 second'

I fixed that by replacing an identical comparison (===) with an equal (==), like that:

$key = $hours === 1 ? 'hour' : 'hours'; -> $key = $hours == 1 ? 'hour' : 'hours';

[ryancramerdesign]

The return value was correct except for the plural issue that Matjaz mentioned above. I've refactored this method to improve it and add the requested 'return' option, though I named it the include option instead (since there is already an exclude option). Adding months and years isn't practical here because they aren't fixed periods of time. I'm sure it could be coded around but the purpose of this function was shorter periods of time, like stopwatch type things. The relativeTimeStr() function might be better for when you need to know months, years, decades.

[adrianbj]

Thanks for the new include options. That certainly helps. Just a note on the relativeTimeStr suggestion though - it only accepts one timestamp, so not very useful as a replacement for elapsedTimeStr, so I do still think this method needs some attempt at handling years and months - I think it's fine to assume 30 or 31 days for all months etc if that helps - I don't think it needs to be perfect.

[ryancramerdesign]

@adrianbj This function focuses on accuracy, so it's more of a stopwatch situation. For that reason, I'd like to avoid approximating number of days/months, etc. So I had it just focus on the fixed types that it could measure accurately (weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds). I do think it would be possible to do the same with months and years, but that's where it gets a lot more complex and beyond my ability to figure out at present. The relativeTimeStr method is more about ballpark accuracy, so maybe the ability could be more easily added there, accepting an optional 2nd time argument.

[matjazpotocnik]

@adrianbj should we close this?

[adrianbj]

@matjazpotocnik - @ryancramerdesign mentioned maybe adding a second argument to the relativeTimeStr method so I think it's worth leaving open for that possibility.