How to create mysql left join in php
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I'm not new to php and mysql, but I am to left joins. I'm currently building a website for a small university newspaper. Articles can be linked to dossiers, so what I want to do is to have an overview page with all the articles in a single dossier. In my editor that wasn't a problem, but on the website itself it should only show the articles which have a publishing date in the past. So this are my tables:

**articles**
> article_id; article_title; article_text; article_onlinedate; article_status; ...

**dossiers**
> dossier_id; dossier_name

**dossier_articles**
> dosar_id; dosar_dossier_id; dosar_article_id

How would I create the mysql query? Something like this:

> SELECT article_title, article_text, article_onlinedate FROM articles LEFT JOIN dossier_articles ON dossier_articles.dosar_dossier_id = articles.article_id WHERE article_status = '1' AND dossier_articles.dosar_dossier_id = '".mysql_real_escape_string($currentDossier)."' AND article_onlinedate < '".date('YmdHis')."' ORDER BY article_onlinedate DESC

I really have no idea whether this comes even close to being correct. Could someone shed a light?

Thanks a lot!