Carbon Difference in Time between two Dates in hh:mm:ss format

Question

I'm trying to figure out how I can take two date time strings that are stored in our database and convert it to a difference in time format of hh:mm:ss.

I looked at diffForHumans, but that does give the format I'd like and returns things like after, ago, etc; which is useful, but not for what I'm trying to do.

The duration will never span days, only a max of a couple hours.

$startTime = Carbon::parse($this->start_time);
$finishTime = Carbon::parse($this->finish_time);

$totalDuration = $finishTime->diffForHumans($startTime);
dd($totalDuration);

// Have: "21 seconds after"
// Want: 00:00:21

Extraversion

fyi, $totalDuration = $finishTime->diffForHumans($startTime, true); dd($totalDuration); Should return "21 seconds". I know that still isn't the format you were looking for, but that is how you remove things like "after" and "ago", as referenced in your question. – Informant

Answer 1

I ended up grabbing the total seconds difference using Carbon:

$totalDuration = $finishTime->diffInSeconds($startTime);
// 21

Then used gmdate:

gmdate('H:i:s', $totalDuration);
// 00:00:21

If anyone has a better way I'd be interested. Otherwise this works.

Extraversion

Only other way I can think of is $finishTime->diff($startTime)->format('%H:%i:%s'); – Indeed

None of these work, if the dates have different days (e.g. Jan 1st and Jan 5th). – Hadhramaut

I've tested this solution spanning dates (different days) and it works. Thanks mtpultz. – Agnola

Only works if diffInSeconds < 86400 (24 hours). Use floor($totalDuration / 3600) . gmdate(":i:s", $totalDuration % 3600) to get durations > 24 hours, e.g. 72:16:12 (72 hours, 16 minutes, 12 seconds). – Owenism

@Hadhramaut see my answer for a solution that works for different days – Cuprum

I believe this needs to be unmarked as the correct answer, because as mentioned, it does not correctly handle values from different days. It does look like it works, so it's very easy to incorrectly use this. – Propriety

Answer 2

$start  = new Carbon('2018-10-04 15:00:03');
$end    = new Carbon('2018-10-05 17:00:09');

You may use

$start->diff($end)->format('%H:%I:%S');

which gives the difference modulo 24h

02:00:06

If you want to have the difference with more than 24h, you may use :

$start->diffInHours($end) . ':' . $start->diff($end)->format('%I:%S');

which gives :

26:00:06

Cuprum

does the solution for more than 24 hours diff works fine for less than 24 hrs too?? my scenario is that the diff can be both i.e. less than or more than 24 hrs – Dagenham

@TabKey yes it works for both – Cuprum

Answer 3

$finishTime->diff($startTime)->format('%H:%I:%S');
// 00:00:21

Reider

Answer 4

I know this is an old question, but it still tops Google results when searching for this sort of thing and Carbon has added a lot of flexibility on this, so wanted to drop a 2022 solution here as well.

TL;DR - check out the documentation for different/more verbose versions of the diffForHumans method, and greater control over options.

As an example, we needed to show the difference between two Carbon instances (start and end) in hours & minutes, but it's possible they're more than 24 hours apart—in which case the minutes become less valuable/important. We want to exclude the "ago" or Also wanted to join the strings with a comma.

We can accomplish all of that, with the $options passed into diffForHumans, like this:

use Carbon\CarbonInterface;

$options = [
  'join' => ', ',
  'parts' => 2,
  'syntax' => CarbonInterface::DIFF_ABSOLUTE,
];

return $end->diffForHumans($start, $options);

Which will result in values like what's seen in the Duration column:

Hope that's helpful for someone!

Loughlin

The question explicitly asks for hh:mm:ss format, which this answer does not provide. – Scintilla

Answer 5

You can do it using the Carbon package this way to get the time difference:

$start_time = new Carbon('14:53:00');
$end_time = new Carbon('15:00:00');
$time_difference_in_minutes = $end_time->diffInMinutes($start_time);//you also find difference in hours using diffInHours()

Schelling

The question explicitly asks for hh:mm:ss format, which this answer does not provide. – Scintilla