Date problems with birthdays

Anon

I have done a search on this and i really didnt find anything useful, if someone can point me in the right direction on this code i am trying to right, please do.

My database contains users and their birthdays (in a mysql db, field name- user_birthday, with the date type yyyy-mm-dd)

I would like to select a month from a drop down box, and then display everyone who has a birthday in that month.

I know this is probably very easy to do, but im very new to php (just started learning two weeks ago)

Thanks for any response

Anon

Well, I am positive that there is probably a much more efficient way to do this but here goes anyway.

create a table with user_birthday

giving yyyy, mm, dd there own fields.

Then print the results where mm='$month';

Easiest way to do it, but probably not the most efficient.. just off the top of my head.

John

amcgrath

Depending on your db's SQL implementation, you could also try using the DATENAME function (some db's might not support though).... or another idea would be to get the last day of the given month create a timestamp using the mktime function and look for dates between. The datename should work for you though.

ace21

Try this

select name from whatever where MONTH(birth) = 3

this would obviously select March.

there is also a function DAYOFMONTH(birth) which will give you all days that match

Hope this helps

Ace21

Anon

I believe there's an even more simple way of doing this. He can actually keep his tables as they are and instead use wildcards in his queries.

SELECT person_name WHERE person_birthday LIKE '__-03-';

This query matches every birthday occuring in March, such as 1975-03-12, 1967-03-25 etc.
The underscores (_) are single character wildcards, they match one singe character which might be any character.
"%" is another wildcard char. A percent mark matches any character and any number of them.

Anon

Thanks for all your input guys (this is the most helpful forum i have ever experienced) Anyway, i went with Ace21 proposal and just made Where(month) = to a variable that got passed from the select form. I did a bunch of if statements like

If $select_month = "May" {
$select_month = 05
}

It works great!!
Thanks again everyone!

(There are so many PHP commands and functions out there, its hard to learn them all without great people like you)