PHP strtotime: Get previous month [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
How to get previous month and year relative to today, using strtotime and date?

Today is December, 31st but strtotime("-1 months") returns December:

echo date("Y-m", strtotime("-1 months"));

Same for strtotime("last month")

How can I properly return the previous month (November)?

Test: http://codepad.viper-7.com/XvMaMB

Hendrix

Answer 1

strtotime("first day of last month")

The first day of is the important part as detailed on the Relative Formats manual page.

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Example: http://codepad.viper-7.com/dB35q8 (with hard-coded today's date)

Rendarender

Thanks. Very misleading! Sounds like it would return "1" or the weekday. – Hendrix

@Hendrix Try it and find out – Encephalograph

@Martin: strtotime always returns a timestamp (or false on failure). So it will return a timestamp of the first day of the last month, but since you are outputting it in Y-m format, that's fine for you. – Doorkeeper

"first day of next month" doesn't work in PHP 5.2.4 – Hendrix

Lots of things won't work in ancient versions of the language. – Rendarender

What will happen if the date is something like 2014-01-31 will it return 2013-12-01..? – Branny

Answer 2

strtotime("-1 months") would be 2012-11-31, but there's no November, 31st. It is one day past 2012-11-30, which gives 2012-12-01. You will see it, when you do

echo date("Y-m-d", strtotime("-1 months"));

gives as output

2012-12-01

See codepad

Bactria

Thanks, that explains it. – Hendrix