Question

I am going to need to return a special value to tell me if the current time is within opening hours:

In table places

ID    OPEN     CLOSE  
1     14:00    16:00  
2     12:00    15:00
3     10:00    14:00

I need to return in the query a special field: PLACE_IS_OPEN – true or false.

so that the returned result when the time is 14:35 is:

ID      PLACE_IS_OPEN
1       1
2       1
3       0

What would be a descent way to go about this?

Answer 1

Test that TIME(NOW()) lies between the open and close times and return its boolean result as a column. This will work as-is if your OPEN,CLOSE are MySQL DATETIME or TIME columns.

SELECT
  ID,
  OPEN,
  CLOSE,
  CASE WHEN TIME(NOW()) BETWEEN `OPEN` AND `CLOSE` THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS PLACE_IS_OPEN
FROM yourtable

If these are character columns rather than proper TIME types, you will need STR_TO_TIME() to convert them

  CASE WHEN TIME(NOW()) BETWEEN TIME(STR_TO_DATE(`OPEN`, '%H:%i')) AND TIME(STR_TO_DATE(`CLOSE`, '%H:%i')) THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS PLACE_IS_OPEN

And MySQL should allow you to simplify the CASE statement away, since the BETWEEN will return a 0 or 1 as it is:

SELECT
  ID,
  OPEN,
  CLOSE,
  (TIME(NOW()) BETWEEN TIME(STR_TO_DATE(`OPEN`, '%H:%i')) AND TIME(STR_TO_DATE(`CLOSE`, '%H:%i'))) AS PLACE_IS_OPEN
FROM yourtable