Laravel 5 using OR condition with BETWEEN

Question

Hi can anyone help me building below query in laravel Eloquent i am really confuse in using OR condition with between

SELECT * FROM tbl WHERE
existing_start BETWEEN $newSTart AND $newEnd OR
$newStart BETWEEN existing_start AND existing_end

i tried using like

whereBetween('existing_start',[$newSTart,$newEnd])

but have no idea how to use OR

Answer 1

There is an orWhereBetween method available from the Query Builder, but it is undocumented in the Query Builder Documentation. You can however find it in the Laravel API Documentation.

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The explanations below assume that the variables have the following values:

$newStart = '1';
$newEnd = '10';

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Unfortunatelly, using orWhereBetween for the second condition is not applicable in your case, because both whereBetween and orWhereBetween will check if a column value is between two input values. This is fine from your first condition since it checks if the existing_start column value is between $newStart and $newEnd. So this is fine:

->whereBetween('existing_start', [$newStart, $newEnd])

As it will be compiled to:

WHERE `existing_start` BETWEEN '1' AND '10'

However your second condition wants to check if an input value from $newStart is between two column values existing_start and existing_end, and there is no Query Builder method that does that. So this will not work:

->orWhereBetween($newStart, ['existing_start', 'existing_end'])

Because it will be compiled to:

OR `1` BETWEEN 'existing_start' AND 'existing_end'

Notice the backticks ` around 1, because of that MySQL will try to find a column named 1 and throw an error.

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So the best option here is to use orWhereRaw with bindings like this:

DB::table('tbl')
  ->whereBetween('existing_start', [$newStart, $newEnd])
  ->orWhereRaw('? BETWEEN existing_start AND existing_end', [$newStart])
  ->get();

The ? will be replaced by the value of $newStart which will be properly quoted and escaped to avoid SQL injection.

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Or course there is always the option of having two grouped conditions that check the boundaries, which would be equivalent to your BETWEEN condition:

DB::table('tbl')
  ->whereBetween('existing_start', [$newStart, $newEnd])
  ->orWhere(function ($query) use ($newStart) {
      $query->where('existing_start', '<=', $newStart);
      $query->where('existing_end', '>=', $newStart);
  })->get();

Which will compile to:

SELECT * FROM `tbl`
WHERE
  `existing_start` BETWEEN '1' AND '10' OR
  (`existing_start` <= '1' AND `existing_end` >= '1')