Easy way to get day number of current quarter?

Question

PHP provides ways to get the number of the current day of the month (date(\'j\')) as well as the number of the current day of the year (date(\'z\')). Is there a way to get the n

Answer 1

Assuming you mean a calendar-quarter (because a company fiscal year can start in any month of the year), you could rely on the date('z') to determine the day-of-year, and then keep a simple array of the day each quarter starts on:

$quarterStartDays = array( 1 /* Jan 1 */, 90 /* Mar 1, non leap-year */, ... );

Then with the current day-of-year you can first locate the largest start-day that's less than or equal to the day-of-year, then subtract.

Note that you need different numbers depending on the leap year.