How to check if a Carbon date object is at the start of day?

Question

I'm using Carbon to manipulate dates I retrieved from my MySQL database. I have dates like the following:

• 2017-07-19 00:00:00
• 2017-06-26 15:27:57

As you can see, the first is the start of a day. When displaying dates like that, I would like to omit the time part. I know I can use a different format for each one. For example:

• F d Y for dates without time.
• F d Y g:ia for dates with time.

What I couldn't accomplish is a simple way to check if a date has a time part to apply one format or the other. Must I use individual getters to check the hour, minute and second?

Cameroun

It is start of the day and end of the previous day. – Alethaalethea

Answer 1

If you just want to check if it's the start of the day, then it's fairly easy to check with Carbon's startOfDay() modifier and a comparison:

$date = Carbon::now(); // or whatever you're using to set it
$start = $date->copy()->startOfDay();
if($date->eq($start)) {
    // do your formatting here
}

Mismatch

Hey, @aynber. This is an interesting approach. In terms of code styling, it's better than check each time property (hour, minute and second). – Cameroun

Carbon has some great functions for modifying and comparing dates and time. The links I provided are for the Carbon docs, and you can see all of the different functions. – Mismatch

Answer 2

In the meanwhile its even easier. Use the is....() methods (see carbon comparison) like this:

$date = Carbon::now();
if($date->isStartOfDay()) {     // check if hour is 00:00:00
    // whatever
}

Muskeg

Probably this function didn't exist at the time I posted the question, 2 years ago. Thank you anyway. – Cameroun

Answer 3

You can use the timestamp of the Carbon object minus the timestamp of "today" (which is yyyy-mm-dd 0000:00:00) and it will give you the number of seconds that passed from 00:00 to that date:

$secondsPassed = $carbonObject->timestamp - $carbonObject->copy()->startOfDay()->timestamp;
if ($secondsPassed > 8 * 60 * 60) {
    // time is passed 08:00 am
} 

Wonderstricken

Hey, @Dekel. Thanks, but it seems that will work only for dates in the current day. – Cameroun

You are right, answer updated. Changed the today to the startOfDay() of the CarbonObject you have – Wonderstricken