comparing dates

[ale1981]

When I enter a date into my database its in this format;

12-11-2002

What I want to do is be able to compare that date with todays date so a date earlier than todays cant be entered. I tried this:

    $today = date("d-m-Y");

$fix_date = GetDateSelectString();

if ($fix_date < $today) {
        error
} else {
        ok
}

.. but the dates dont compare, there are lots of problems when month dates are greater etc. I have even tried taking the "-" out and then comparing but still problems! help!

UPDATE - I just read that using the timestamp is the best way to compare two dates, so how would I convert the format "12-11-2002" into a timestamp?

any help gratefully appreciated, thanks.

[Weedpacket]

Well, strtotime() wouldn't be a good choice, because your date is ambiguous - is that November 12 or December 11? Yes, it's November 12, I know, but how's the computer to tell when it's entered? Y-m-d is more reliable.

Anyway, because you can't use strtotime(), you'll need to break out the day, month and year portions by hand. list($day, $month, $year) = explode('-', $date) would do that. Then use mktime() to put those together as a timestamp.

[ale1981]

Big thanks 😃 Weedpacket.

Here is what my code looks like now, and works fine:

    $t_today = getdate();
    $t_day = $t_today['mday'];
    $t_month = $t_today['mon'];
    $t_year = $t_today['year'];

$today = mktime(0,0,0,$t_month,$t_day,$t_year);

$fix_date = GetDateSelectString();

list($day, $month, $year) = explode('-', $fix_date);

$fix_date2 = mktime(0,0,0,$month,$day,$year);

$error_code = "0";

if ($fix_date2 < $today) {
    error
} else {
    ok
}

[ale1981]

What would I use to convert a timestamp back into the date format (day-month-year)?

[buck2bcr]

format (day-month-year)

date("d-m-Y",$stamp) //where $stamp is your timestamp

HTH

[ale1981]

thanks all, works a treat now.