Forward:

I've scanned through the existing questions/answers on this matter. This is not a duplicitous question; I cannot find a working solution from the accepted answers.

The main questions/answers I've reviewed can be found here: How to calculate the difference between two dates using PHP?

What I need:

A calucalation of the difference between two dates expressed as years, months and days that works with PHP version: 5.2.

<?php
$current_date = date('d-M-Y');
$future_date = '2012-11-01';
?>

What I've tried:

1. Most answers I find online don't seem to exact in that they don't factor in leap years.
2. This highly rated answer won't work because DateTime->diff() is php 5.3+.

3. This accepted answer results in (i.e. the second block of code aimed at PHP 5.2) results in the following being parsed:

   Array ( [y] => 25 [m] => 11 [d] => 7 [h] => 3 [i] => 15 [s] => 19 [invert] => 0 [days] => 9473 ) Array ( [y] => 25 [m] => 11 [d] => 7 [h] => 3 [i] => 15 [s] => 19 [invert] => 1 [days] => 9473 )

I can't tell if I've incorrectly applied the code or it's simply a case of me not knowing how to manipulate the array.