Check the same date with PHP DateTime comparison operator

June 19, 2022

why this two dates doesn’t equal?

<?php

$a = new DateTime();
$b = new DateTime();
var_dump($a->format('d-m-Y H:i:s'));
var_dump($b->format('d-m-Y H:i:s'));
if ($a == $b) {
    echo "same";
}

i try PHP 8.1, 8.0 and 7.4 so i don’t think is a bug, maybe DateTime compare microseconds? If that’s so how i compare simple d-m-Y? Wihtout simply formatting and do a string comparison of course

>Solution :

Yeah there is a .000003 delay between each line of PHP hence == wont work because it’s not exactly the same

Example:

<?php
$a = new DateTime();
$b = new DateTime();
var_dump($a);
echo "<br>";
var_dump($b);

Output:

object(DateTime)#1 (3) { ["date"]=> string(26) "2022-06-19 15:26:56.020431" ["timezone_type"]=> int(3) ["timezone"]=> string(13) "Europe/Berlin" }
object(DateTime)#2 (3) { ["date"]=> string(26) "2022-06-19 15:26:56.020434" ["timezone_type"]=> int(3) ["timezone"]=> string(13) "Europe/Berlin" }```