PHP: simplest way to get the date of the month 6 months prior on the first?

Question

So if today was April 12, 2010 it should return October 1, 2009

Some possible solutions I\'ve googled seem overly complex, any suggestions?

Answer 1

It was discussed in comments but the accepted answer has some unneeded strtotime() calls. Can be simplified to:

date("F 1, Y", strtotime("Feb 2, 2010 - 6 months"));

Also, you can use DateTime() like this which I think is equally as readable:

(new DateTime('Feb 2, 2010'))->modify('-6 months')->format('M 1, Y');

Or using static method....

DateTime::createFromFormat('M j, Y','Feb 2, 2010')
    ->modify('-6 months')
    ->format('M 1, Y');