Re: Re: $mydata->StampDate

On 27/06/05, Jasper Bryant-Greene <jasper@bryant-greene.name> wrote: > John Taylor-Johnston wrote: > > I could just change the field type. But how do you calculate it? I don't > > see much to inspire a start. I'm not a full-time coder either. More of a > > tinkerer. I don't want someone to do it for me, but need to get my head > > around how to do it. > > http://ca3.php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php > > As I said, though, you should be using a MySQL date field. Have a look > at the MySQL manual for the corresponding functions to the above -- > there's probably a quicker way with MySQL too. Dates should almost always be stored as dates in a database, not varchars. This allows for more and/or faster date functions, sorting that works (it only works with yyyy-mm-dd format in varchars), and you can select the data into a unix timestamp instead of needing to strtotime() first. The calculation in mysql couldn't be much simpler. select datediff(StampDate, '2003-08-23') as StampDateDiff From the manual: DATEDIFF() returns the number of days between the start date expr and the end date expr2. expr and expr2 are date or date-and-time expressions. Only the date parts of the values are used in the calculation. mysql> SELECT DATEDIFF('1997-12-31 23:59:59','1997-12-30'); -> 1 http://mysql.org/doc/mysql/en/date-and-time-functions.html