Advanced Custom Fields repeter field expiration

Question

I'm developing a small online-courses website for a friend and got stuck with ACF repeater field!

Here's my code to display the course dates table:

<?php 
$rows = get_field('dates');
$i = 1;

if($rows) { ?>
    <table class="specs">
        <thead>
            <tr>
                <th colspan="5">Course Dates</th>
            </tr>
        </thead>
        </tbody>
            <?php                               
            foreach($rows as $row) { 
                echo '<tr>';
                echo '<td>' . $i . '</td>';
                echo '<td>' . $row['start_date'] ;

                // Check, if "end_date" field is not empty
                if( $row['end_date']) {
                    echo ' - ' . $row['end_date'] . '</td>';
                } else {
                    echo '</td>';
                }

                echo '<td>10am – 5pm</td>';
                echo '<td>£' . $row['course_price'] .'</td>';
                echo '<td><a href="#" class="button orange">Book Now</a></td>';
                echo '</tr>';
                $i++;
            }; ?>
        </tbody>
    </table> 

<?php }

This code outputs a nice table:

The only thing I can't figure out is how to check ['start_date'] sub_field against current date and display courses in the loop with valid dates only.

So, basically, I need to auto delete or just exclude from the loop a whole table row if the [start_date] sub_field is not valid any more!

Is there any workaround for this?

Answer 1

Possibly better than strtotime, as you already know the date format would be date_create_from_format(). Something like:

$course_start = date_create_from_format('dmY',$row['start_date']);
if ($course_start > date('dmY')){
        echo '<tr>';
        echo '<td>' . $i . '</td>';
        echo '<td>' . $row['start_date'] ;

        // Check, if "end_date" field is not empty
        if( $row['end_date']) {
            echo ' - ' . $row['end_date'] . '</td>';
        } else {
            echo '</td>';
        }

        echo '<td>10am – 5pm</td>';
        echo '<td>£' . $row['course_price'] .'</td>';
        echo '<td><a href="#" class="button orange">Book Now</a></td>';
        echo '</tr>';
        $i++;
    }

Answer 2

I assume "not valid" means it's in the past?! Then you would be searching for a condition like this:

 if( strtotime($row['start_date']) > time() ) { ....

in your context:

    <?php                               
    foreach($rows as $row) { 
        if( strtotime($row['start_date']) > time() ) {
            echo '<tr>';
            echo '<td>' . $i . '</td>';
            echo '<td>' . $row['start_date'] ;

            // Check, if "end_date" field is not empty
            if( $row['end_date']) {
                echo ' - ' . $row['end_date'] . '</td>';
            } else {
                echo '</td>';
            }

            echo '<td>10am – 5pm</td>';
            echo '<td>£' . $row['course_price'] .'</td>';
            echo '<td><a href="#" class="button orange">Book Now</a></td>';
            echo '</tr>';
            $i++;
        }
    }; ?>

General advice: Be carefull with strtotime() though. It can be picky what kind of dates formats work and deliver unexpected results. In most of the cases it's better to save dates as a proper format in the database (i.e. unix timestamp or sql date fields).