Dealing With Dates?

[justlukeyou]

Hi,

Im trying to set a form in which people can insert dates. For example they can insert their birthday. However Im not sure in which format they should be entered in.

Is there a standard method of dealing wth dates. Should I have one column for day, one for the month and one for the year. Or should they all be entered into one column.

Is there standard way of using dates?

[Sogo7]

The date input on the form should ideally be split into three dropdown boxes (Year, Month, Day) then you stick them all together as a single string with a delimiter character when it gets to the webserver eg: 1968-12-23 This way there is no chance of people stuffing up the format or putting in stupid dates, now the string can then be inserted into a single column of a typical SQL database. If the column format/attribute is set to 'Datetime' you can then use SQL commands to easily sort the rows of data by the users birthdays.

[StarLion]

or else feed it through strtotime, and reject the form submission if you get false back; that way you can accept the standard formats. The dropdowns are the better solution.

[Cups]

Here are some old discussions on dealing with dropdown date pickers and handling the input.

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/show...elector-Script

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/show...ate-validation

There are many more if you want to use Advanced Search