Question

I have several strings stored in a database (yes, I know it’s not the best practice, but I’m working with a system someone else designed and I cannot change it.)

For example, in my table called specialDates, I have a computedDate column that contains this:

 date('d', strtotime("thursday, november ".date("Y")." + 3 weeks")) 

This is pulled into my code and stored in a variable called $request['order_date'].

This, when used in standard PHP code, returns the date that Thanksgiving falls on in the current year. I need to pass the evaluated value of this (for this year – 2013 – the value is 28) to another query. But I can’t seem to get the value to evaluate.

$query = 'SELECT count(orderID) as numberOfOrders FROM customer_orders WHERE customerID = ? AND orderDate = ?';
$param = array($request['customer_id'], eval($request['order_date']));

doesn’t work. And when I just try to echo out the value to the screen, doing this:

echo eval($request['order_date']);

or this:

echo eval(" return \$request['order_date']; ");

just prints out the literal value of the string (i.e. date('d' etc.) rather than the expected evaluated value.

What am I doing wrong?

UPDATED
I tried AScherer’s answer below, and although it does work when I just echo the value to the screen:

echo eval(" return {$request['order_date']}; ");

it does not work when I try to use the eval inside my array:

$param = array($request['customer_id'], eval("return {$request['order_date']}"));

How can I get this working so that the value I’m passing in the array is the actual value of 28, rather than the string pre-eval?

Answer 1

You were escaping the $request in your return part, which you dont want to do. This method should work, but id suggest adding return the the row in the database so u dont have to modify the eval

$sql = "SELECT customer_id, CONCAT( 'return ', order_date, ';' ) as function from customer_orders WHERE customerID = ? AND orderDate = ?";
$param = array( $request[ 'customer_id' ], eval( $request[ 'function '] ) );

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OR
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$evalData = eval(" return {$request['order_date']}; ");
$param = array($request['customer_id'], $evalData );