Select the latest stored records based on a particular field

janhouse00

Please look at the following table structure with dynamically populated data. In this case, how do I extract all the records with DATE (22-2-2005)? Assuming I do not know the date is "22-2-2005" . Thank you.

TABLE test

id INT(10) | data CHAR(255) | date DATE

1 | test | 22-2-2005
2 | test | 21-2-2005
3 | test | 19-2-2005
4 | test | 22-2-2005
5 | test | 20-2-2005

stutterbug

I don't understand the question clearly. Without knowing the date, you wish to get all the records according to that date? Do you want to find all the records that have more than one entry? Or do you want to find all the records according to a date dynamically selected by a user? Can you pose that again?

(Also, if users are selecting the date, can you give an indication of how they are selecting that date? Dropdown list? Input field?)

NSH

I think the question is asking to get the latest stored data based on dates.

You could do an ORDER BY which seems like it would be the easiest method then pull the entries right off the top.

Although the difficult part is coding to know when to stop.
If you wanted to only pull the last entries you could do a LIMIT statement to limit how many are actually pulled.

This method is a bit more static, but if you could be a little clearer in the question it would help!

stutterbug

Okay, I guess I will try to answer your question with a few guesses as to what you need to do.

I am assuming you can't hard code the date into your PHP because it is being supplied by an outside source (such as a user's browser). This date, I am assuming, will not arrive in a way that is immediately friendly to PHP (though you could code it so that it is, such as building a drop-down list that has a value of something like '22-2-2005', but displays it to the user in a friendlier manner). As long as the user doesn't supply something potentially ambiguous (2-1-2005 may mean February 2, 2005 or January 2, 2005 to the user), this should be the query you wish to use:

// $str_time is the date in question you are searching for. It can be in any format.
$timestamp = strtotime($str_time); // parse the string into a useable timestamp
$sql_date = date("d-m-Y",$timestamp); // format the timestamp into the format you specified
$sql = "SELECT * FROM test WHERE date = '$sql_date'"; // build the query

I hope this leaves you close to your goal.