Shortest way to compare 2 dates in dd/mm/yyyy format

Question

can anyone suggest the neatest way to do this comparison? I need to test if a date provided in dd/mm/yyyy format is less than a fixed date, e.g 01/05/2009 - I know I can convert

Answer 1

One option is just to reverse the format - create a string of the form

yyyy/mm/dd

That's a sortable format, so you can just do an ordinal string comparison. Of course, this means you won't detect invalid data etc.