How to compare dates with YYYY-MM-DD ?

[dico]

I am wanted to see which date is older/newer?

Can I use:

$start_date="2008-08-10";
$end_date="2008-09-13";

if($start_date<$end_date) {
echo "start is less than end";
}

It doesn't seem to work 100% for me. How best can I compare dates?

-dr

[Kudose]

if(strtotime($start_date) < strtotime($end_date)) // do stuff

[Weedpacket]

One of the reasons why YYYY-MM-DD is the international standard is that it does compare correctly when treated as a string. If you want to make that explicit you could use [man]strcmp[/man] instead.

So do you have an example of when it doesn't work?