I would agree with you, but I have no control on inherited web apps. I now need to concentrate on trying to fix this. From: Ashley Sheridan [mailto:ash@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2010 8:38 AM To: David Stoltz Cc: php-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: [PHP] Date Conversion Problem On Thu, 2010-06-17 at 08:35 -0400, David Stoltz wrote: PHP newbie here... I have some PHP code writing the date/time into a MS SQL 2000 database like this: date('l jS \of F Y h:i:s A') So the text it writes into the DB is like: Thursday 15th of April 2010 10:13:42 AM The database field is defined as varchar, not datetime...so it's a string essentially... How in the world do I do a date conversion on this? I've tried things like: select * from table where convert(datetime,fieldname) >= '6/10/2010' (where fieldname is the string in question) Which results in "Syntax error converting datetime from character string." So I guess I have two questions: 1) Can I write a SQL query that will convert this properly into a datetime? 2) If not, I guess I'll need to change the code to write the date differently into the system, how should this statement be changed to allow for proper conversion? date('l jS \of F Y h:i:s A') Thanks for any help! It's best to store the date as a date rather than a string, as it avoids the sorts of problems you're seeing now. Thanks, Ash http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk
