Question

The SQLite documentation says to store dates as TEXT or as sqlite binaries. So, I thought I’d use str(datetime.datetime.now()). How would you go about sorting a column by date order when it’s stored in TEXT format?

Answer 1

ISO dates are text sortable:

>>> datetime.now().isoformat()
'2012-06-16T19:34:05.418407'
>>> sorted([datetime.now().isoformat(), (datetime.now() - timedelta(days=100)).isoformat()])
['2012-03-08T19:34:06.802304', '2012-06-16T19:34:06.802288']