If $due_date contains a DateTime object, $due_date_diff will contain
c. a DateInterval object
Explanation:
The DateInterval class ¶ represents a date interval.
A date interval stores either a fixed amount of time (in years, months, days, hours etc) or a relative time string in the format that DateTime's constructor supports.
The diff method is just as easy to use, but provides an extra piece of information: total days. This is important because when using the DateTime object to find a difference, we have a source and destination date, and therefore we can reduce the units of time into larger denominations. However, having the total number of days in between is a valuable piece of information.
The PHP DateTime class has three methods that work with a DateInterval object: