[thelist] simple question about comparing dates in PHP/MySQL

Lee Kowalkowski lee.kowalkowski at googlemail.com
Tue Jul 7 14:35:45 CDT 2009


2009/7/7 Nan Harbison <nan at nanharbison.com>:
> This might be a stupid question, but someone was trying to tell me that you
> can compare dates in the format:
> 2009-06-04 > 2009-05-30.
>
> I thought I had to convert dates using strtotime() to compare dates, but he
> said he had been doing it and it worked fine. I have found it works
> sporadically.
> Can anyone give me a definitive answer on this subject? I googled for it,
> and most articles have you convert the date, but nowhere does any article
> say you actually have to convert or why. I think it is because the date as
> 2009-07-7 is a string and it is doing some string comparison?

To sort your dates it should work fine as long as you are using
yyyy-mm-dd, both strings use the same encoding and you always zero-pad
your single-digit months and days.  It'll work until the year 10000
anyway.

You can't use this if you're interested in the difference between the
dates, obviously.

-- 
Lee
www.webdeavour.co.uk



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