How to find nearest day of week in php?

Question

How to find a speciefic nearest day of the week in PHP if initially I have a date string like: 07.05.2010? For example, I want to find the nearest Sunday (or any day of the week). How can I implement this? Thanks

Answer 1

Just in case you wanted the nearest day rather than the next one, here is a way to do that.

$target = "Sunday";
$date   = "07.05.2010";

// Old-school DateTime::createFromFormat
list($dom, $mon, $year) = sscanf($date, "%02d.%02d.%04d");
$date = new DateTime("$year/$mon/$dom -4 days");
// Skip ahead to $target day
$date->modify("next $target");

echo $date->format("d.m.Y");

And as of PHP 5.3, that middle portion can be simply

$date = DateTime::createFromFormat("!d.m.Y", $date)
        ->modify("-4 days")->modify("next $target");

Answer 2

This should do:

echo date('d.m.Y', strtotime('next Sunday', strtotime('07.05.2010')));

Answer 3

/**
 *
 * @param \DateTime $date
 * @param $dayOfWeek - e.g Monday, Tuesday ...
 */
public function findNearestDayOfWeek(\DateTime $date, $dayOfWeek)
{
    $dayOfWeek = ucfirst($dayOfWeek);
    $daysOfWeek = array(
        'Monday',
        'Tuesday',
        'Wednesday',
        'Thursday',
        'Friday',
        'Saturday',
        'Sunday',
    );
    if(!in_array($dayOfWeek, $daysOfWeek)){

        throw new \InvalidArgumentException('Invalid day of week:'.$dayOfWeek);
    }
    if($date->format('l') == $dayOfWeek){

        return $date;
    }

    $previous = clone $date;
    $previous->modify('last '.$dayOfWeek);

    $next = clone $date;
    $next->modify('next '.$dayOfWeek);

    $previousDiff = $date->diff($previous);
    $nextDiff = $date->diff($next);

    $previousDiffDays = $previousDiff->format('%a');
    $nextDiffDays = $nextDiff->format('%a');

    if($previousDiffDays < $nextDiffDays){

        return $previous;
    }

    return $next;
}

Alternatively you could create a map of what days of weeks are closer, e.g if you're after closest Monday to Wednesday, it would be faster to just find the previous Monday given that it's closer than the next Monday.

Answer 4

There are several answers posted and I keep seeing solutions that could give me either the next instance of a day of the week or the previous instance but not the closest. To address this, I came up with this function:

function closestDate($day){

    $day = ucfirst($day);
    if(date('l', time()) == $day)
        return date("Y-m-d", time());
    else if(abs(time()-strtotime('next '.$day)) < abs(time()-strtotime('last '.$day)))
        return date("Y-m-d", strtotime('next '.$day));
    else
        return date("Y-m-d", strtotime('last '.$day));

}

Input: a day of the week ("sunday", "Monday", etc.)

Output: If I asked for the nearest "sunday" and today is:

1. "Sunday": I will get today's date
2. "Monday": I will get yesterday's date
3. "Saturday: I will get tomorrow's date

Hope this helps :)

Answer 5

This can be done using only strtotime() and a little trickery.

function findNearest($day, $date)
{
    return strtotime("next $day", strtotime("$date - 4 days"));
}

echo date('d.m.Y', findNearest("Sunday", "07.05.2010")); // 09.05.2010
echo               findNearest("Sunday", "07.05.2010");  // 1273377600
echo date('d.m.Y', findNearest("Sunday", "09.05.2010")); // 09.05.2010
echo               findNearest("Sunday", "09.05.2010");  // 1273377600
echo date('d.m.Y', findNearest("Sunday", "05.05.2010")); // 02.05.2010
echo               findNearest("Sunday", "05.05.2010");  // 1272772800

Answer 6

strtotime is magical

echo date("d/m/y", strtotime("next sunday", strtotime("07.05.2010")  ) );

Answer 7

You can use Carbon library as well

$date = Carbon::create(2015, 7, 2); // 2015-07-02

// To get the first day of the week 
$monday = $date->startOfWeek(); // 2015-06-29

$mondayTwoWeeksLater = $date->addWeek(2); // 2015-07-13