Calculate the number of months between two dates in PHP?

Question

Without using PHP 5.3\'s date_diff function (I\'m using PHP 5.2.17), is there a simple and accurate way to do this? I am thinking of something like the code below, but I don

Answer 1

Follow up on the answer of @deceze (I've upvoted on his answer). Month will still count as a whole even if the day of the first date didn't reached the day of the second date.

Here's my simple solution on including the day:

$ts1=strtotime($date1);
$ts2=strtotime($date2);

$year1 = date('Y', $ts1);
$year2 = date('Y', $ts2);

$month1 = date('m', $ts1);
$month2 = date('m', $ts2);

$day1 = date('d', $ts1); /* I'VE ADDED THE DAY VARIABLE OF DATE1 AND DATE2 */
$day2 = date('d', $ts2);

$diff = (($year2 - $year1) * 12) + ($month2 - $month1);

/* IF THE DAY2 IS LESS THAN DAY1, IT WILL LESSEN THE $diff VALUE BY ONE */

if($day2<$day1){ $diff=$diff-1; }

The logic is, if the day of the second date is less than the day of the first date, it will reduce the value of $diff variable by one.