Question

I want to get records between to date from mysql database. I wrote this but it does not work :

$from_date = "2012-06-19";
$to_date = "2012-06-24";

SELECT * 
  FROM `contracts` 
 WHERE `indate` >= '$from_date' 
   AND `indate` <= '$to_date' 
 ORDER BY `id` DESC

My dates are : 2012-06-20 , 2012-06-21 , 2012-06-22 , 2012-06-23

Answer 1

What you’re doing should work fine. I select from date fields like this all the time at work.

mysql> create table contracts (indate date);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec)

mysql> insert into contracts values ('2012-10-06'), ('2012-11-04'), ('2012-09-17');
Query OK, 3 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Records: 3  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

mysql> set @from_date = '2012-10-01';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> set @to_date = '2012-10-31';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> select * from contracts where indate >= @from_date and indate <= @to_date;
+------------+
| indate     |
+------------+
| 2012-10-06 |
+------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

I used mysql variables here of course, but there’s nothing to them; they just contain strings. You could do this instead:

mysql> select * from contracts where indate >= '2012-10-01' and indate <= '2012-10-31';
+------------+
| indate     |
+------------+
| 2012-10-06 |
+------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

The O.P. are right though, BETWEEN is much more succinct:

mysql> select * from contracts where indate between '2012-10-01' and  '2012-10-31';
+------------+
| indate     |
+------------+
| 2012-10-06 |
+------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

The magic of the date comparison is because the field is of date type.