PEAR::DB connecting to Access via ODBC - problems with dates

I am using the following code to access and query an ms access database.


the connection works just fine and in my production code there is plenty of error checking.

the problem i have is formatting the dates correctly for inclusion in the query parameter. i have tried just about every combination i can think of and get, variously, empty result sets and errors. MS access seems to want something akin to a number but including the slashes and surrounded by hash signs.
ie


but of course we can't give this type of data in php as the hash sign is a commment designator. yes i could output a specific ascii character but this seems really backwards.

the relevant field type in access is date/time.

does anyone have any experience of how to use dates in queries to access databases across odbc using PEARB?

thanks
justin

to all those who take the time to read, there are two solutions...

solution 1 - replace the ? placeholder (which is for scalars) with the ! for literals. then forget the quirky access date format and use the standard yyyy-mm-dd variant.

solution 2 - replace the criteria with a single criterion

and set the array parameter to "May".

clearly solution 1 is more flexible and is the implementation i was after. The second is quite neat for ease of reference. I suspect that it may not be very efficient in terms of processing time however.

thanks
Justin