Return all Mondays between two dates while excluding certain dates from an array

Question

In php, return all Mondays between two dates. However, exclude certain dates as needed/listed. Then, show all dates, but use the "strike" tag in html to display the dates from the excluded list.

This code returns a decent result, but there must be a more eloquent solution that uses the DateTime functions and a possibly a list of dates to exclude as an array.

`$startDate = date('Y-m-d', strtotime('this monday'));
$endDate = date('Y-m-d', strtotime('2024-05-06'));
$endDate = strtotime($endDate);
for($i = strtotime('Monday', strtotime($startDate)); $i <= $endDate; $i = strtotime('+1 week', $i)) {
  if ( $i != strtotime('Monday', strtotime('2024-02-19')) &&
    $i != strtotime('Monday', strtotime('2024-03-25')) &&
    $i != strtotime('Monday', strtotime('2024-05-13')) ) {
      echo "<li>";
        echo date('D. M. jS', $i);
      echo "</li>";
    } else {
      // strike through the excluded dates with <s> tag
      echo "<li><s>";
        echo date('D. M. jS', $i);
      echo "</s></li>";
    }
}`

Answer 1

You can rewrite the code using DateTime like below

$startDate = new DateTime('this monday');
$endDate = new DateTime('2024-05-06');
$excludedDates = ['2024-02-19', '2024-03-25', '2024-05-13'];

$currentDate = clone $startDate;

while ($currentDate <= $endDate) {
    if (!in_array($currentDate->format('Y-m-d'), $excludedDates) && $currentDate->format('l') === 'Monday') {
        echo "<li>" . $currentDate->format('D. M. jS') . "</li>";
    } else {
        echo "<li><s>" . $currentDate->format('D. M. jS') . "</s></li>";
    }

    $currentDate->modify('+1 week');
}