Mysql Wildcards

[Anon]

I've found out that and underscore "_" acts as a wildcard for a single character and so in order to produce a page which displays only article from this month I've made the following code:

<?
#DB Query
$this_month = substr(date("Y-m"), 0, 7);
$sql = "SELECT * FROM data WHERE date = \"$this_month-__\" ";

....

Now I've echoed back what the variable $this_month contains and it's "2001-11" as expected.
Now when I run this query it only finds 1 record, one that the date is set to "0000-00-00".
Where as if I run a query set as today's date:
$sql = "SELECT * FROM data WHERE date = \"$this_month-08\" ";

It find the two records I created today.

Has anyone had any experience with MYSQl Wildcards and how to get the little monkeys working?

[Anon]

I was being DUMB!

I should have used LIKE instead of =

$sql = "SELECT * FROM data WHERE date LIKE \"$this_month-__\" ";

This now works!

[Anon]

One of the great strengths of MySQL are all it's built-in date functions.

This strikes me as an odd method of parsing a date... very inneficient and hard to modify if you decided to change your date-parsing system later (say to print out "October 2nd" instead of "10-2"

Using a MySQL datetime column type and the MONTH() and YEAR() argument would speed up the query and be easier to change later.

"SELECT * FROM data WHERE YEAR(date) = YEAR($yourdate) AND MONTH(date) = MONTH($yourdate)"

Eric