How to get all dates between two given dates in PHP ?

Recently i needed date string array for a project i am working on. Let me show you how i implemented that.

After some digging on PHP documentation. I found there’s a special PHP class DatePeriod that can be used to implement that.

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“A date period allows iteration over a set of dates and times, recurring at regular intervals, over a given period.”

DatePeriod class has a signature as below,

public DatePeriod::__construct ( DateTimeInterface $start , DateInterval $interval , DateTimeInterface $end [, int $options ] )

As you can can notice, to create DatePeriod object you need two DateTime( Implements DateTimeInterface) objects and DateInterval object .

You can simply create DateTime object by passing date string as below,

public DateTime::__construct ([ string $time = "now" [, DateTimeZone $timezone = NULL ]] )

$date = new DateTime('2018-01-01');
$date = new DateTime();//now

To create a DateInterval object you need to pass interval string as described below.

public DateInterval::__construct ( string $interval_spec )

$Duration = new DateInterval( "P1M" );

$interval_spec is defined as below,

Period Designator	Description
P	Period
Y	years
M	months
D	days
W	weeks. These get converted into days, so can not be combined with D.
T	Time
H	hours
M	minutes
S	seconds

Below is some samples for interval specifications

String
P1Y	1 Year
P2M	2 Months
P7D	7 Days
P3W	3 Weeks
PT5H	5 Hours
PT2H30M	2 Hour and 30 minutes
PT5M45S	5 Minutes 45 seconds
P3WT8H	3 weeks 8 hours
P1Y2M3DT4H5M6S	1 year 2 months 3 days 4 hours 5 minutes and 6 seconds

Now you must have basic understanding about DateTime and DateInterval objects. Let’s create a DatePeriod.

$start = new DateTime( '2018-01-01' );
$end = new DateTime( '2018-04-01' );
$interval = new DateInterval('P1D');//one day interval

$date_period = new DatePeriod($start, $interval ,$end);

Now you can iterate through the DatePeriod object and create a dates array or use it as you needed

$dates_arr = array();

foreach($date_period as $date){
    array_push($dates_arr,$date->format("Y-m-d"));
}

print_r($dates_arr);

here i have used Format to get the Date in the format i needed.

Let me know your thoughts in comments. Cheers !