Question

I am trying to order a database by date but I am having trouble sorting it. The database is created in SQL through PHP and the column I want to use to sort by adds the date data in this format:

2011-10-26 07:10

The above date is also a ‘varchar’.
EDIT: changed to ‘datetime’ thanks to suggestions

Any idea so that I can sort the rows in the table using the date column?

I made a separate script to narrow this problem down:

<?php
$con = mysql_connect("localhost","root","");
mysql_select_db("thoughtsdata",$con);


$order = "SELECT * 
FROM  `thoughts` 
ORDER BY  `thoughts`.`DateTime` ASC 
LIMIT 0 , 30";

if(!mysql_query($order,$con))
{
die('Could not order database: ' . mysql_error());
}


mysql_close($con);
?>

I now get no errors when running this script in my browser but my table remains unsorted:

  Edit    Inline Edit     Copy   Delete Hey sdfasdf    2011-10-26 19:41:00
  Edit    Inline Edit     Copy   Delete Hey asdfasdf    2011-10-26 07:47:00 
  Edit    Inline Edit     Copy   Delete Hey dfasdfasdf    2011-10-26 19:47:00   
  Edit    Inline Edit     Copy   Delete aaa how to sort this    2011-10-26 07:54:00 
  Edit    Inline Edit     Copy   Delete aaa any progress!!??    2011-10-26 08:13:00 
  Edit    Inline Edit     Copy   Delete oh no!  grrr    2011-10-26 08:21:00 
  Edit    Inline Edit     Copy   Delete zzTOp   thinking about sorting this out!    2011-10-27 19:12:00

What seems to me happening, is that the database is sorted but it does not stay like that.

Answer 1

You could try using an order clause like this:

ORDER BY UNIX_TIMESTAMP(fieldname) ASC

However, if your field is in YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm format like it looks, an alpha sort should work correctly. This is all under the assumption that you are working with an existing system and can’t / aren’t allowed to change the field’s datatype.