Checking if date is weekend PHP

Solution 1:

If you have PHP >= 5.1:

function isWeekend($date) {
    return (date('N', strtotime($date)) >= 6);
}

otherwise:

function isWeekend($date) {
    $weekDay = date('w', strtotime($date));
    return ($weekDay == 0 || $weekDay == 6);
}

Solution 2:

Another way is to use the DateTime class, this way you can also specify the timezone. Note: PHP 5.3 or higher.

// For the current date
function isTodayWeekend() {
    $currentDate = new DateTime("now", new DateTimeZone("Europe/Amsterdam"));
    return $currentDate->format('N') >= 6;
}

If you need to be able to check a certain date string, you can use DateTime::createFromFormat

function isWeekend($date) {
    $inputDate = DateTime::createFromFormat("d-m-Y", $date, new DateTimeZone("Europe/Amsterdam"));
    return $inputDate->format('N') >= 6;
}

The beauty of this way is that you can specify the timezone without changing the timezone globally in PHP, which might cause side-effects in other scripts (for ex. Wordpress).