How to populate a table with a range of dates?

Question

I need a MySQL table to hold ALL DATES between 2011-01-01 and 2011-12-31. I have created a table with one column names \"_date\", type DATE.

With what query can I po

Answer 1

This can be achieved in PHP by using a simple for loop. There are a couple of ways to do it. One way would be to to place the original date in a variable and have the loop run through it for every day by adding +1 day on each loop, for instance, you'll start on 01/01/2011 and then the loop will add 0 the first time, 1 day the next, followed by 2 days so forth and so forth to the $i variable. You could then print out the days or add them to your database. In this case $i would represent the counter with 0 being the starting point, <=365 is how many loops you want to go through which is equal to or less than the number of days and $i++ adds +1 to the $i variable on each loop.

date('Y-m-d' converts the date into yyyy-mm-dd. Using a capital Y gives you a full 4 digit year whereas using a lower case y will give you the last 2 digits of the year. You want to keep it in this order to add it in a date field in mySQL.

strtotime($originalDate parses the date into a Unix time stamp and the ."+".$i." day") basically adds the value of $i in days to the date.

Finally there's the mysqli query. $db represents the database connection variable, this will need to be changed to whatever variable you have set for the connection. This is followed by the actual query. Just exchange the word table for your table name and the date before VALUES to you date row name and you're ready to go.

The following is an example:

Another way to achieve this using the for function would be to include the strtotime dates directly in the for actions as an oppose to the counter variables, which is an even shorter piece of code. Replace $i=0 (the starting counter point) with the starting day point, follow that with the less than or equal to the end day point (the number of loops) then finally with your plus +1 to the first statement placed into a variable ready for use.

Finally, convert the date into Y-m-d format ready to be placed into the database and run the query.

Again, as with the first example, this can be printed or placed directly into your database.

The following is an example:

I've probably made it sound more confusing than it is, but hope it will at least give you an idea on how it works.