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

Question

I need to get previous month and year, relative to current date.

However, see following example.

// Today is 2011-03-30
echo date(\'Y-m-d\', strtotim         


        

Answer 1

I think you've found a bug in the strtotime function. Whenever I have to work around this, I always find myself doing math on the month/year values. Try something like this:

$LastMonth = (date('n') - 1) % 12;
$Year      =  date('Y') - !$LastMonth;

Answer 2

If a DateTime solution is acceptable this snippet returns the year of last month and month of last month avoiding the possible trap when you run this in January.

function fn_LastMonthYearNumber()
{
 $now = new DateTime();
 $lastMonth = $now->sub(new DateInterval('P1M'));
 $lm= $lastMonth->format('m');
 $ly= $lastMonth->format('Y');
 return array($lm,$ly);
}

Answer 3

if the day itself doesn't matter do this:

echo date('Y-m-d', strtotime(date('Y-m')." -1 month"));