That would also throw if I were to enter something such as O'Reily, so I think you'll need to re-evaluate what you are doing for detection.
Until PHP 6 which is when I hope we get it, PHP is not multibyte native. You can make use of multibyte functionality with the mb_* functions; however, I do not believe there exists an mb_strcmp function. You can write one though. Probably a check against the length of both, and if they match you can then use something like the mb_substr_count to see if it counts 1.
PCRE is classified as multibyte safe as well if you use the 'u' modifier, so you should be able to do comparisons using preg_match as well.
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As of PHP 5.5, the MySQL library has been officially deprecated. It is recommended to move to either MySQLi or PDO libraries for your mysql connectivity. See here for help choosing which interface you prefer: http://php.net/manual/en/mysqlinfo.api.choosing.php
I don't understand what you mean by multiple. Do you mean in your query? That query would result in the newest 7 entries assuming the date is a DateTime or derivative type in mysql (ie not a string).
If you need to show it, than you need to iterate it with a while loop and mysql_fetch_assoc or mysql_fetch_row.
See the link in my signature as well. The mysql library will disappear soon and so you should replace it with mysqli or pdo.
__________________
As of PHP 5.5, the MySQL library has been officially deprecated. It is recommended to move to either MySQLi or PDO libraries for your mysql connectivity. See here for help choosing which interface you prefer: http://php.net/manual/en/mysqlinfo.api.choosing.php