Yesterday I learned the hard way that there are not always 86,400 seconds in a day. It just so happens that yesterday on Sunday there were only 82,800 because yesterday Sunday was only 23 hours long. This is particularly tricky when you use a programming language that stores time as seconds since Jan 1, 1970, and you want to iterate over a date range.

You might want to do something harmless like:

function date_range($start_date, $end_date) {
  
  $current_date = strtotime($start_date);
  $end_date     = strtotime($end_date);

  while ($current_date <= $end_date) {
    $date_range[] = strftime("%Y-%m-%d", $current_date);  
    $current_date += 86400;
  }

  return $date_range;
}

But don’t. If your date range falls over daylight saving time (as mine did yesterday), you’ll be missing your end date. I fixed this particular bug by relying on the liberal input of strtotime:

function date_range($start_date, $end_date) {
  
  $current_date = strtotime($start_date);
  $end_date     = strtotime($end_date);

  while ($current_date <= $end_date) {
    $date_range[] = strftime("%Y-%m-%d", $current_date);
    $current_date = strtotime("+1 day", $current_date);
  }

  return $date_range;
}

So, word to the wise: wcgrep 86400

Update: Stephanie looked at my post and said, “Didn’t daylight saving time start on Sunday?” Umm, yes, yes it did.