search pub_date by month and year only?

i have a custom news search feature where users can select a month and year to show all news items that have a publish date with that month and year. ultimately i am using ditto to display the summaries but how can i use the ditto filter parameter to check for the month and year of the "pub_date" field ignoring the day? or if this is not possible how can i query the database to return a recordset of IDs to use? my SQL is pretty good but i don’t know how to use the unix timestamp employed by modx.

thanks!

up

Could the DateFilter extender be what you need?
KP
http://www.pogwatch.com/ditto/ditto-extenders/ditto-datefilter.html

Thanks guys but this original post is now 2 years old and has a layer of dust so thick I can’t even remember what it was needed for. I must have sorted it out myself at the time

I have finally found the snippet GetTime
http://modxcms.com/extras/package/26