compare timestamps problem

[chillbear]

my first post here...so..HI GUYS 😃

im working on kind of a junk food delivery service database...the goal is to find an appropriate pizza service or whatever at a certain time...so u can choose at what time u want to eat and this value should be compared with the delivery times stored in the database.....something like "SELECT * from delivery_service WHERE deliver_start < $eattime < deliver_stop"
i tried to use different time formats but none of them was really appropriate for this task. actually im working on a solution with time in the format 21:32 where i remove the ":" and then i get integers which are easy to compare. but it doesnt work correctly, because if u want to eat at 01:30 (am) it formats the time to 0130 which is a too small number to get any results with that system. so i wanted to ask u, if u have any better idea to solve that problem...maybe a better time-format or some hints how to handle this...any help welcome 🙂
thx in advance!

[steadyguy]

you could use explode() on a normally formatted time. For example:

$myTime = '21:32';
$hoursAndMinutes = explode(':', $myTime);

This will give you an indexed array, where key 0 has a value of '21', and key 1 has a value of '32';

Is that the sort of thing you're looking for?

Another option might be to find timestamps for the current time, and say, the opening time, and the closing time (today) with mktime, then just use > and < to find out if the time is within the desired range.

[chillbear]

sounds good, I'll try it later today....but i think this is already the solution, big thx 🙂

[tekky]

a TIME field in SQL should be of 24hr format and SHOULD allow for a start_field < 13:02:00 < end_field....