Get Days Between Two Dates

Problem

You need to find how many seconds, minutes, hours, days, months or years have passed between two dates.

Solution

Use JavaScript’s Date function getTime(). Which provides how much time in milliseconds have passed since 01/01/1970:

DAY = 1000 * 60 * 60  * 24

d1 = new Date('02/01/2011')
d2 = new Date('02/06/2011')

days_passed = Math.round((d2.getTime() - d1.getTime()) / DAY)

Discussion

Using milliseconds makes the life easier to avoid overflow mistakes with Dates. So we first calculate how many milliseconds are in a day. Then, given two distinct dates, get the difference in milliseconds between two dates and then divide by how many milliseconds are in a day. It will return the days between two distinct dates.

If you’d like to calculate the hours between two date objects, you can do that by dividing the difference in milliseconds by the conversion of milliseconds to hours. The same goes for minutes and seconds.

HOUR = 1000 * 60 * 60

d1 = new Date('02/01/2011 02:20')
d2 = new Date('02/06/2011 05:20')

hour_passed = Math.round((d2.getTime() - d1.getTime()) / HOUR)