[nycphp-talk] handling vague dates.
David Vogel
davevgl at yahoo.com
Wed Oct 1 14:15:35 EDT 2003
Thanks, for all the suggestions, that helps a lot.
dv
--- Hans Zaunere <hans at nyphp.org> wrote:
>
>
> David Vogel wrote:
>
> > Hey,
> >
> > I have a small batch of dates that I'd like to get into a db.
> Almost
> > all of them are specific, eg October 1. However, a few refer to
> things
> > that happen around a certain time. For example students' "Housing
> bill
> > for spring semester due" is listed as 'Early January'.
> >
> > So, I'm not sure how to set up the db to accomodate the oddballs.
> Any
> > suggestions would be much appreciated.
>
> I've dealt with almost the same thing. Very often, patients will say
> "I was sick in March" or "I came down with xyz in 1970".
>
> I wrote http://pcomd.net/Ymd to handle these types of things (you can
> just download/copy the source without worrying about the pCom part of
> it) and it's worked great. While the code is tuned for MySQL the
> premise remains the same for any DB; use ISO dates, which have no
> problem being ambiguous and are super fast/portable (they're just
> ints). The only items I see that Ymd wouldn't address for you is
> stating "early xyz...", and they require at least a year to be used
> (although these could be hacked out).
>
> HTH,
>
> H
>
>
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