Outputting Dates

redrabbit

Hello,

I have content on my website that is retrieved from a database.

I have managed to only output entries from the current month. However, i also want to list other months like this :

May
April
Febuary
December

So the months will be listed where there is an entry.

The only way i can think of doing this is like this:

Loop through entries NOT from this month
* If the month of entry doesnt exist in array, then add.

Then at the end output all entries from the array.

Anyone have any other ideas about how this could be done ?

devinemke

not sure i understand. you want to list all 12 months and then all the records from each month? you would have to pull all the records then.

redrabbit

No, i do not wish to do that.

I want to output only the months where a blog exists. When a user goes to my Blog section i want to see all the entries from THIS month.

Additionally i want to see listed the previous months where entries exist, only the months name so they can click on it to view entries. Like this:

march
January
October

So you see, not ALL months, only ones where an entry exists.

Any ideas ?

rachel2004

I can think of at least one or two ways of solving this, but it depends on your table structure. In your table structure, do you have a column type of date or another similar type like datetime ?

If you are, then I would say use UNIX timestamp values to do your comparison where a blog entry exists and the month is not equal to current month.

If you have your date broken into separate columns such as month, date, and year, then you have a second way of solving way this.

Can you post more info about your table?

devinemke

i guess then i would do 2 queries. first grab everything from the current month (i don't know you exact data structure so i'm guessing at table/field names):

$result = mysql_query ('SELECT * FROM blog WHERE MONTH(date) = ' . date ('m') . ')');

then just grab the month from all the records to show how many are in each month:

$result = mysql_query ('SELECT MONTH(date) AS month FROM blog');
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc ($result)) {$months[] = $row['month'];}
$months = array_count_values ($months);
foreach ($months as $key => $value)
{
	echo $key . ' has ' . $value . ' blog entries<br>';
}

you now have an array $months that contains the months as keys and the number of blog entries per month as values.