[php] Checking if date is weekend PHP

This function seems to only return false. Are any of you getting the same? I'm sure I'm overlooking something, however, fresh eyes and all that ...

function isweekend($date){
    $date = strtotime($date);
    $date = date("l", $date);
    $date = strtolower($date);
    echo $date;
    if($date == "saturday" || $date == "sunday") {
        return "true";
    } else {
        return "false";
    }
}

I call the function using the following:

$isthisaweekend = isweekend('2011-01-01');

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).

This works for me and is reusable.

function isThisDayAWeekend($date) {

    $timestamp = strtotime($date);

    $weekday= date("l", $timestamp );

    if ($weekday =="Saturday" OR $weekday =="Sunday") { return true; } 
    else {return false; }

}

For guys like me, who aren't minimalistic, there is a PECL extension called "intl". I use it for idn conversion since it works way better than the "idn" extension and some other n1 classes like "IntlDateFormatter".

Well, what I want to say is, the "intl" extension has a class called "IntlCalendar" which can handle many international countries (e.g. in Saudi Arabia, sunday is not a weekend day). The IntlCalendar has a method IntlCalendar::isWeekend for that. Maybe you guys give it a shot, I like that "it works for almost every country" fact on these intl-classes.

EDIT: Not quite sure but since PHP 5.5.0, the intl extension is bundled with PHP (--enable-intl).

The working version of your code (from the errors pointed out by BoltClock):

<?php
$date = '2011-01-01';
$timestamp = strtotime($date);
$weekday= date("l", $timestamp );
$normalized_weekday = strtolower($weekday);
echo $normalized_weekday ;
if (($normalized_weekday == "saturday") || ($normalized_weekday == "sunday")) {
    echo "true";
} else {
    echo "false";
}

?>

The stray "{" is difficult to see, especially without a decent PHP editor (in my case). So I post the corrected version here.

If you're using PHP 5.5 or PHP 7 above, you may want to use:

function isTodayWeekend() {
    return in_array(date("l"), ["Saturday", "Sunday"]);
}

and it will return "true" if today is weekend and "false" if not.

Here:

function isweekend($year, $month, $day)
{
    $time = mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, $day, $year);
    $weekday = date('w', $time);
    return ($weekday == 0 || $weekday == 6);
}