Storing business hours in database

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Storing business hours in database

ocon

4:54 pm on Mar 25, 2012 (gmt 0)

I have a large database of different businesses around the world that I would like to include their business hours. I'm wondering how to best store their hours in the database.

I would like to be able to nicely output their hours on my website, something like:

Sun: Closed
Mon-Fri: 7AM-9PM
Sat: 10AM-6PM

Sun-Sat: 24hrs

Sun: Closed
Mon: 12PM-6PM
Tue: Closed
Wed: 10AM-12PM, 3PM-7PM
Thu-Sat: 12PM-7PM

While at the same time I am looking to be able to perform database queries to search for businesses that are currently open.

Right now a single row on one table is all that is needed for each listing and ideally I would like to keep it that way.

While I don't want to display it on the website, I also realize for things like performing the currently open searches, I need to somehow account for different timezones.

g1smd

6:24 pm on Mar 25, 2012 (gmt 0)

Firstly, use 24 hour time. It will make things a lot easier.

You'll also need a list of places that observe DST and the dates that apply for each one... otherwise your "open now" indicator will be off by an hour for 5 to 7 months of the year.

topr8

7:24 pm on Mar 25, 2012 (gmt 0)

either have 4 fields for each day.
first open,first closed, second open, second close
(that's assuming that shops only ever (potentially) close for lunch and not twice a day)
so you have an extra 28 fields in the table per store
then build a php function to calculate the opening times on the page.

or.
there can only be so many open/close sequences.
create an extra table with one row for each variation and reference the id field in your businesses table.