Manipulating Dates???

[Anon]

Another question!
I have an interface with dropdown menus with Months in one, days in another...how am I going to enter these in the database(mySQL)...ie what datatype will I use?? I cant use date cause that must be YYYY-MM-DD. I may have to be able to carry out calculations on these dates afterwards....is there something like DAY or MONTH I can use as a datatype?

Thanks again!
Audrey

[Anon]

What is wrong with YYYYMMDD format? MySQL has excellent date handling functions.

[Anon]

Okay so should I enter it as Date and then I can somehow add the values of my dropdown menus to equal the Date?
Will this work?

Thanks for the advice

[Anon]

You could do something like:

$date = "$year-$month-$day";

$sql = "INSERT INTO MyTable ( MyDateField ) VALUES ( '$date' )";

[[deleted]]

nope.

Always store the date in your database as either a DATE or DATETIME type, or put the timestamp in an INTEREGER field.

If you use DATE or DATETIME you can use the date calculation functions which are very usefull, and you can use DATE_FORMAT() to SELECT a date in any format you like.

Never ever store a date as a string.

[Anon]

I didn't mean store it as a string, vincent, I was demonstrating how you could assemble the three pulldown vars into a value a DATE field would accept.