Summing years between two dates

[Legacial]

Hey guys,

I'm trying to build a search feature in my site that will allow an employer to search for a student based on the number of years of work experience they have. There are two categories of work experience: current and previous. So the code is supposed to get the total number of years of work experience for each student (current + previous), based on the work dates they have posted.

So far, I have been able to obtain a piece of code that gets a rough estimate for the number of years between two dates. What I want is for the total number of years to be added and displayed in a table if both the current and previous work experience dates belong to the same student. This is my code so far...

PHP Code:

<?php 
                              $workprevious = mysql_query("Select * from work_experience, students where students.stud_ID = work_experience.stud_ID AND work_type='previous'") or die (mysql_error());
                              $row_workprevious = mysql_fetch_assoc($workprevious);
                              $date1 = $row_workprevious['work_date_from'];
                            $date2 = $row_workprevious['work_date_to'];
                            $diff = abs(strtotime($date2) - strtotime($date1));
                            $years = floor($diff / (365*60*60*24));
                            
                              
                              $workcurrent = mysql_query("Select * from work_experience, students where students.stud_ID = work_experience.stud_ID AND work_type='current'") or die (mysql_error());
                              $row_workcurrent = mysql_fetch_assoc($workcurrent);
                              
                                $date3 = $row_workcurrent['work_date_from'];
                                $date4 = $row_workcurrent['work_date_to'];
                                $difference = abs(strtotime($date3) - strtotime($date4));
                                $year = floor($difference / (365*60*60*24));
                                echo $years;
                                
                                if ($row_workprevious['stud_ID']==$row_workcurrent['stud_ID']) {
                                    $total = $years + $year;
                                    echo $total;
                                }
                                elseif ($row_workprevious['stud_ID']==$row_workcurrent['stud_ID']) {
                                    echo $year;
                                    echo $years;
                                }
                              ?>

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated as I'm still new in php

[sunfighter]

Don't know how you have the dates formatted, but this code works to get the difference in time. It's set to show days, but can be changed:

PHP Code:

<?php
$datetime1 = date_create('2009-10-11');
$datetime2 = date_create('2009-10-13');
$interval = date_diff($datetime1, $datetime2);
echo $interval->format('%a days');
?>