Newbie Help with Date

Ben6308

OK, so on my add.php page, it has a form. On this form, I would like to have the staff enter the date of birth. (YYYY-MM-DD). How is the best way to do this. Just a simple field, or drop down or what?

Then, how do I enter this into the MySQL Database. Should I use a special function or what?

Then, how do I get it back from the Database, and display it in user-friendly format, like April 16, 1980.

I think it is something like date(), but I'm lost. If you could walk me through it, I'd really appreciate it.

Thank you so much, and I'm sorry to be such a newbie. 🙁

matto

hi!

i suggest this:

use three separate text inputs: YYYY MM DD.
validate them using the checkdate function http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.checkdate.php
this is very easy!

my way of storing dates in databases is to use simple integer fields which hold the unix timestamp (seconds from 1970/1/1, 0:00). therefore, convert $year, $month, $day to a timestamp:

$timestamp = mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, $day, $year);
(look up the mktime function in php.net)

i like using unix timestamps because you can handle (calculate, display) them comfortably with php's date/time functions.

echo date("F d, Y", $timestamp); will give: April 16, 1980

the other way is to make use of the database's "date" datatype. the advantage is that, if you have to do sophisticated date/time calculations in your sql statements, you can have the db handle that which increases performance of large queries (because f. ex. you don't have to calculate something in your scripts ... for every record you read in from the db. can take time!).

usually you can insert dates into date-type table fields using the syntax '1980-04-16'. but this depends on your local db settings, be sure to try it out first.

in order to format a date string coming from a date-type field, you can either format it using an sql function (to_char or the like) or grab it to your script, explode it into day, month and year substrings, mktime() it into a timestamp and do the same echo date(...) as above.

hope this helps ...

bobby_rahman

Hiya I have read this thread and am in the same boat.

Firstly How can you create drop down boxes showign valid day, month, year. I suppose it could be done usign a static list. i.e Add into the list.. Monday.....Tuesday.....then do Jan, Dec.....and insert onlt a few years up to 2010.

But How do you validate that some months have less days than others?

Im sure there must be an easier way to create dynamic date drop down boxes for the date to be entered by the user.
(just aint found it yet)

Now next problem from reading in the forum .....is timestamp a data type such as varchar and int.

Basicaly can I stored the date using create table user......
userid int(7), date timestamp (4)....in mysql?

Next problem would be to get the date entered by the user and convert is as a timestamp? rite????

Cheers
Bob