regular expressions for date handling

[Anon]

about six months ago when i was first learning php / mysql, i did an incredibly stupid move, which was inserting dates using date() instead of unix timestamp, and storing it as a varchar.

now that i've gone on to adding some sorting functionality, this has gotten pretty stupid, as one can imagine, since sorting by date will produce something like

september 8th, 05:04am
september 6th, 13:48pm
september 5th, 12:13pm
september 23rd, 10:22am
september 20th, 15:09pm
september 18th, 20:32pm
september 18th, 15:23pm
september 17th, 15:47pm
september 16th, 16:46pm
september 13th, 11:27am

and so on.

ugh.

so i've gotten to thinking, perhaps i could
somehow use a regular expression to evaluate if there's a 12 or 3 prepended to the second digit, and somehow resort the array?

while i assume anything is pretty much possible in theory, how feasible is it?
if anyone has any thoughts, ideas, code from
similar experiences, it'd be most appreciated.

lesson learned. sigh

-a

[[deleted]]

processing the date on the fly is definately not an option, unless you have a few weeks to spare when doing a query.

You'll definately have to change to using a timestamp type of thing.

You can simply split() each date into parts, and process each part seperately to get the month, day, hour and seconds.
From there you can use mktime() to create a timestamp that you can put back into the database.