Convert string to date

[Arc]

Hey guys. I am pulling a date out of a database that looks like "mm/dd/yy" and assigning it to a variable. I am also getting todays date via the date("m/d/y") fucntion and putting it into a variable.

So I am taking those two dates and comparing them to see if the date coming from the database is less than todays date like this ...

$estCompDate = $anyRow['NewEstDate'];///date coming from database
 $today=date("m/d/y");//todays date

if($estCompDate<$today){
$bColor="#FF5454";
$fColor="#ffffff";
}

That seemed to work fine until the new year came around and now it is not working right. I assume that is becuase I am comparing a date to a string and since the new year flipped over the todays date is lower than the estCompDate that might be 11/23/07 for instance.

If that is correct then I need to know how to convert the date I am getting out of the database to a date variable and not a string.

Thanks!

[NogDog]

Is the column in the database a DATE or DATETIME column? Also, what DBMS are you using, e.g. MySQL?

[wilku]

You can try using [man]strtotime[/man] and [man]time[/man] but I don't know if it will treat 01/02/08 as the 1st of February or the 2nd of Januray.
Alternatively, you can [man]explode[/man] your date with "/" and use [man]mktime[/man] to build the unix timestamp to compare with current time.