Is it possible to convert this to a "count-up" counter as well? I want to count down from today (eg. D-21) to a certain date (D)and then everyday upwards from there (D+x). Any help would be much appreciated!

Reply from Peter: In the sample code, the $remain value will continue to go into the negative, so you could do a test on that and then output the absolute value of that as the “count up” value.

FWIW, I modified your function to cast from int to a string: $remain = (string)$remain; and then return(ed) $remain; at the end of the function, which loaded it into a var by the calling function. Then I used the string to write on an image with GD functions, fiddlingh with the x,y coordinates based on if strlen($remain) was 2 or 1. GD is a whole other difficult Sudoku puzzle, but I got the thing to work. Thanks again.

Yes, my mistake – ‘fulfilment_day’ should have been in quotes! And you were right about the 29 characters being fishy – I didn’t realize, but I was returning a "formatted" version of the string – so instead of:

$dayy = get_ept_field(‘fulfilment_day’);

I had to use:

$dayy = get_ept_field(‘fulfilment_day’, array(‘raw’ => ‘true’) );

which returned string(2) "11", and could be passed correctly into your function!

Thanks so much for your help – I’m sorry it wasn’t more of an interesting problem rather than a snafu on my part. Still, I hope this can help someone in the future.

$dayy = the_ept_field(fulfilment_day);
var_dump($dayy);

returns: string(29) "10"

$dnum = (int)$dayy;
var_dump($dnum);

returns: int(0)

(also returns 0 using intval($dayy) )

Any help is greatly appreciated! Hopefully this advice can help others looking to dynamically add dates to your function!

Reply from Peter: PHP is quite flexible, so in this case I don’t think it makes a huge difference whether it’s a string or an integer. I’m not sure what the issue is, although the fact that your original value is apparently 29 characters long suggests something fishy. Also, is “fulfilment_day” a string (in which case, it should be enclosed in quotes)? A variable?

As in, I have some variables like $fd = get_ept_field(fulfilment_day)
and I want to pass those into function.

So I’ve been doing something like

countdown("Christmas Day", 12, (int)$fd, 2008); to call the function, but it just won’t carry through to the actual function

You wouldn’t happen to know where I’ve gone wrong would you?

In any case thanks for this function – I’ve been looking for it everywhere!

Reply from Peter: Yes, that is definitely possible. Do a var_dump( $fd ); to check whether that variable contains what you think it does.