Question

Possible Duplicate:
php date compare

I have a date that I take from the mySQL database that looks like this:

2011-06-20

And I get the date of the current day in this way:

$todaydate = date('Y-m-d');

What I need to know is how do I compare the two results?

How can I compare the dates and understand for example if a week is passed from the database date or a month or a year..etc..?

Thank you!!

Answer 1

There is no need to put that burden on PHP when MySQL has built-in functionality for that already. You should take a look at MySQL’s DATEDIFF() function:

DATEDIFF() returns expr1 – expr2 expressed as a value in days from one date to the other. expr1 and expr2 are date or date-and-time expressions. Only the date parts of the values are used in the calculation.

An example of two dates that’d give a 7-day difference could be:

mysql> select datediff('2011-06-18','2011-06-25');
+-------------------------------------+
| datediff('2011-06-18','2011-06-25') |
+-------------------------------------+
|                                  -7 | 
+-------------------------------------+

This means that the first date occured -7 days after the first date; that’s 7 days before. If you let the two arguments switch place, the result would be a positive 7.