Date Comparisons and insertions

[Anon]

I am recieving a date formatted like this, "DEC-10-01" First, I need to insert it into mySQL then I need to be able to compare those dates and know when a month rolls over.

I have not really look into the date inserting, but I dont think that iwll be a problem. What I was hoping was set some sort of flag to 'no' then use a select statement like

select *
from table
order by date;

convert the results to an array, then do something like

last_month = " ";
beginning_of_month = "no";
foreach(record)
if(current_month != last month)
Set the flag to yes

This way I would know when the first record of each month is, and I could do some special processing to it. Any help appriciated

Zack

[[deleted]]

You can use substr() to grab the three parts of the date, then use seomthing like an associative array to replace the jan/feb/.../dec with their numerical equivalents.

$aMonths = array("JAN"=>1, "FEB"=>2...etc);
$iMonth = $aMonths[$grabbed_month_string];

Then add 2000 or 1900 to the year to get the real year instead of "01".
Then you can create a string like 2001-12-17 to insert into the mysql date field.

To find the start of month, just look for records where the day number is 1, or look for the lowest day number per month.
Try to avoid flags in your database, because all you do is mark the fact that some field contains certain data, which you already know because the field contains certain data.