Check if date is less than today's date

Question

I need to find if custom date provided by application user is less than today's date or not.

I'm trying following code:

$today    = JFactory::getDate();                        // 2015-06-14 16:54:50
$expected = JFactory::getDate($data['expected_date']);  // 2015-06-14 00:00:00

if ($expected < $today)
{
    throw new UnexpectedValueException(JText::_('COM_MYCOMPONENT_REQUEST_EXPECTED_DATE_ERROR'));
}

As you can see above, $today returns correct date but it returns with time which causes my if loop to fail.

I usually prefer Joomla way to implement any code. It's great!

Answer 1

I always compare dates with unix timestamps. In this day, there is no question about minutes or timezones.

if ($expected->toUnix() < $today->toUnix())

On the other hand, if you want to only compare only the date part, you can just format the dates and compare them with the simple string comparison:

if ($expected->format('Y-m-d') < $today->format('Y-m-d'))

In addition, when you receive a date, it may be on user timezone, so you could have to convert it:

$userTz = JFactory::getUser()->getParam('timezone');
$timeZone = JFactory::getConfig()->get('offset');

if ($userTz)
{
    $timeZone = $userTz;
}

$tz = new DateTimeZone($timeZone);
$date = JFactory::getDate($expected, $tz);