Question

I have an unavoidable situation where the dates are stored in UK date format, e.g.:

31/12/2001  00:00:00

I need it in descending order, I’ve tried this but it errors

select *, DATE_FORMAT(completiondate,'\%e/%c/%Y\') as cdate 
from projects 
where countries = 1 
order by cdate desc

Error:

check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the
the right syntax to use near ” order by cdate desc’

I’m using MySQL 4.1.9

Answer 1

You are escaping the % character unnecessarily. But the actual problem is that that you have an un-terminated string literal in your query:

-- this does not terminate the string ----------v
select *, DATE_FORMAT(completiondate,'\%e/%c/%Y\') as cdate
from projects
where countries = 1
order by cdate desc

Change to:

SELECT *, DATE_FORMAT(completiondate,'%e/%c/%Y') AS cdate
FROM projects
WHERE countries = 1
ORDER BY cdate DESC