[Resolved] sorting dates intuitively 2 is not after 19 and before 20!

rastem

Hey all,

I have a script that displays upcoming events pulled from MYSQL. They're displayed in the order they're supposed to be happening, but the dates are screwed up. it displays October 2 before October 20 and after October 19, for instance. I know there's a way to do this but forgot how. Please help.

Also, if someone already has an idea of a good system to do this with, I'd love to hear it. As it stands, the dates are simply entered in MM-DD-YYYY format manually, and that may not be the best way.

Keep truckin,

Ras.

stolzyboy

what you said

it displays October 2 before October 20 and after October 19

means it will display like

October 19

October 2

October 20

right?

And you are using ORDER BY blah, right?

Is the field set as an INT or is a VARCHAR, it seems to me that it is acting like a VARCHAR, since it is only looking at the first number.

Change the field to INT and it should work.

YappyDog

If his column is defined as a VARCHAR, then it will have the dashes in it and it won't convert very well to an INT. He either needs to:

somehow convert to a date type column

enter his dates in the format YYYY-MM-DD so they'll sort correctly (as long as he puts a leading zero in the MM and the DD portion of the dates.

rastem

That sounds like it should work...but now I'm stuck in a new conundrum. I need a good way to insert upcoming dates for these events and have it so that they can be displayed on a page. Now I can insert the dates in YYYY-MM-DD, but is there a way to convert that setup into "Month DD - Month DD" e.g. "September 1 - October 12"?

stolzyboy

you may wanna look at the strtotime function

rastem

Checking it out, thanks stolzyboy! I'll figure it out from here (provided the integer thing works). Thanks to all who posted! And remember, your posts not only help the person whose question is being answered, but everyone else with this question, as well (who bother to run searches on prior posts, of course :rolleyes: ).

ras.