Question: I see there are other posts on this question in other languages, but I can't find one for PHP. I'm not looking for the difference between two date times, but rather how many days different. For example:

`2011-08-06 14:05:28`

and

`2011-08-07 08:46:28`

are less then one day apart, but I want a function that will tell me they are on days that are one day apart, i.e. will return a value of `1` for these two dates, and return a value of `2` for the following dates, for example:

`2011-08-06 23:05:28`

and

`2011-08-08 01:46:28`

Really, I'm guessing it must be easy, but I've not worked much with dates before.

Oh, and one more constraint, I need something compatible with PHP 5.2, so can't use `DateTime::diff`.

EDIT: changed to clarify that I do really need a numeric return value, sorry :)

Answer: 
```
$date1 = "2011-08-06 14:05:28";
$date2 = "2011-08-07 08:46:28";
if(date('Ymd', strtotime($date1)) == date('Ymd', strtotime($date2)))
{
    // Same day!
}

```

**Update**

If you really want the number of days between to dates, I suggest you update to PHP 5.3. Calculating the number of days can be rather difficult, especially if you want to be able to handle days in different years.

```
$days = abs(date('z', strtotime($date1)) - date('z', strtotime($date2)));

```

This is the best I can do, but it *requires* that `$date1` and `$date2` are in the same year.
```
$secondsApart = strtotime( '2011-08-07 08:46:28' ) -
                   strtotime( '2011-08-06 14:05:28' );

```

Now you can compute any other value based on that:

```
$hoursApart = round( $secondsApart / 3600 );
$daysApart = round( $secondsApart / 86400 );
...

```

You can also use floor() or ceil() instead round() if that better suits your need.