String hh：mm to date.sql hh：mm（Android，Java）或String to Time（PHP）

Question

In my getRequest i'm passing two Strings (minTime and maxTime), in MySQL I have two columns TIME (minTime and maxTime) I need all the registers between these two values.

For that reason I need to convert minTime and maxTime to sql.date and retrieve the proper registers (with strings is not working properly). I'm trying many things without success, for example:

String minTime_user = "10:45"

java.util.Date utilDate = new SimpleDateFormat("hh:mm").parse(minTime_user);

//output: Thu Jan 01 10:28:00 GMT-05:00 1970

java.sql.Date sqlDate = new java.sql.Date(utilDate.getTime());

//output: 1970-01-01

If not possible, how can I convert String to Time in PHP? I've seen the function strtotime but it returns the number of seconds since 1970, ideally I prefer the format "hh:mm" to be able to compare without having to convert the values of my table to Unix.

Answer 1

If, as you say, your time is stored in a TIME column, you can compare times directly in a MySQL query:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE column BETWEEN "10:45" AND "15:44";

See here for a demo.

PHP is a loosely typed language, so you have no need to worry about converting it to anything; it's sent to MySQL as a string.

Edit: the documentation recommends explicitly casting the values to TIME within the query, so you'd end up with something like this:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE column BETWEEN CAST("10:45" AS TIME) AND CAST("15:44" AS TIME);

Though I've never had any problems using this function without the casting.