How to add Date and Time to get DateTime in Laravel? - laravel

Question

I have two columns in my DB: date and time. I want to combine them into DateTime so that I can use diff() to get a difference between the current time and the combined DateTime.

Answer 1

$query = DB::query("select concat(date," ",time) as datetime from TABLENAME"); using this row query you can concat the date and time DB values; and it will works like datetime value.

Answer 2

You can use mutators for this:
// assuming your date field is in format Y-m-d and time H:i:s
// and you want the property named someTimestamp
public function getSomeTimestampAttribute()
{
// use Carbon\Carbon for the class
return new Carbon($this->attributes['date'] . ' ' . $this->attributes['time']);
}
public function setSomeTimestampAttribute($dateTime)
{
// parse param to get string 'Y-m-d H:i:s'
$dateTime = $this->fromDateTime($dateTime);
$date = substr($dateTime, 0, 10); // Y-m-d
$time = substr($dateTime, 11); // H:i:s
$this->attributes['date'] = $date;
$this->attributes['time'] = $time;
}
Then you can do this:
// get
$model->someTimestamp; // Carbon instance depending on date & time db fields
$model->someTimestamp->diff(Carbon::now());
// set - all methods do the same
$model->someTimestamp = new Carbon('2014-08-31 11:55:00');
$model->someTimestamp = new DateTime('2014-08-31 11:55:00');
$model->someTimestamp = '2014-08-31 11:55:00';
// then this is true
$model->date; // 2014-08-31
$model->time; // 11:55:00
// so you can now call ->save() on the model and values in db will be correct

Answer 3

Concatenating the two variables storing wasn't enough, it needed more. I am using Laravel, so in my case this did the trick:
$datetime = $date.' '.$time;
$datetime = new DateTime($datetime);
All I needed was a DateTime object, and this is how I got it. So after this I can easily get the difference between two DateTime objects.
$currentDateTime = new DateTime(); //Returns current time & date in a DateTime object
$difference = $currentDateTime->diff($datetime);
$difference has all that I wanted.