php search date with different format - php

Question

At my current database i use date format yyyy-mm-dd.
If i want to search by DOB then must use format yyyy-mm-dd to match it with default date format.
Is there a way to search DOB from whatever user input wether its dd-mm-yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy or yyyy-mm-dd and give out the result???
$keyword = clean($keyword,1);
$result = $db->query("SELECT name, dob, email FROM user WHERE name LIKE '$keyword%' OR dob LIKE '$keyword%' OR email LIKE '$keyword%'");
if($result){
//echoing the result
}

Answer 1

Not easily. First convert the user input to the correct format before passing it to the SQL query.
For example:
if (preg_match('~([0-9]{2})[-/]([0-9]{2})[-/]([0-9]{4})~', $input, $matches)) {
return $matches[3].'-'.$matches[2].'-'.$matches[1];
} else {
return $input;
}

Answer 2

You could match UNIX Timestamps eg:
$timestamp = strtotime($date)
SELECT * WHERE UNIX_TIMESTAMP(dob) = '$timestamp'
Check http://php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php for more info on strtotime()
This will make it easier for checking within a date range.

Answer 3

Yes, you should normalise the result in PHP before passing it to your SQL query.
Your code may look something like this...
$dateForSqlQuery = date('Y-m-d', strtotime($input));
...assuming that strtotime() will correctly handle those variations.
On the other hand, you should really break up the user input into a separate day, month and year input, then generate the string yourself.

Answer 4

You can use strtotime to parse pretty much any (reasonably formatted) date to a timestamp, and from there you can convert to any other format.
For example:
$yyyy_mm_dd = date('Y-m-d', strtotime('02/01/2012'));
It's quite a processor heavy function though, strtotime, so do be sparing!