UBB.Developers Forums Community Development Programming PHP and Server-side Scripting time

i'm building a report at work against a MS SQL database with financial info in it. my boss is desiring the report to take, for example, today's date, and compare it to the same "DAY" last year.

so if we ran a report for today: Tues March 11, 2003
it would compare against Tues March 12, 2002.

It seems simple except for Leap Years. Anybody have any advice on the best practice to do this. I'm thinking convert to time stamp and do some IF conditions to determine if a Leap year is involved.

Any help would be appreciated.

Chillin

I don't know about MS SQL, but MySQL has some column types specifically for storing dates and times. If you're using one of those, you can make use of the Date and Time Functions, such as DATE_SUB.

unfortunately, the dates in this particular db/tables are stored as YYYY-MM-DD, i have a stored procedure that does somethign similar as to what i'd like to do.

i'll try to hack it to work with php and post

A good way to see if a year is a leap one is to divide it by 4. If the modulus is 0 then it is a leap year, hence 2000, 2004, 2008 are whereas 2001, 2002, 2003 etc. are not.

Actually, it is not quite that easy, but it'll be a while before that calculation won't work again. =]

Alternatively you can use the mcal library (http://mcal.chek.com) which introduces the mcal_is_leap_year. You pass the year as an integer and it returns true or false depending on whether the year is a leap one or not.

Or just this:
date("L", mktime(0,0,0,1,1,2004)) which will be true or false depending on if the year is a leap year or not.

In this case, use date("L", strtotime($datefromdb))

Ok I give up! LOL

I won!

;]