Getting last month's date in php

Question

I want to get last month\'s date. I wrote this out:

$prevmonth = date(\'M Y\');

Which gives me the current month/year. I can\'t tell if I

Answer 1

It's simple to get last month date

echo date("Y-n-j", strtotime("first day of previous month"));
echo date("Y-n-j", strtotime("last day of previous month"));

at November 3 returns

2014-10-1
2014-10-31

Answer 2

Use this short code to get previous month for any given date:

$tgl = '25 january 2012';

$prevmonth = date("M Y",mktime(0,0,0,date("m", strtotime($tgl))-1,1,date("Y", strtotime($tgl))));
echo $prevmonth;

The result is December 2011. Works on a month with shorter day with previous month.

Answer 3

$time = mktime(0, 0, 0, date("m"),date("d")-date("t"), date("Y"));
$lastMonth = date("d-m-Y", $time);

OR

$lastMonth = date("m-Y", mktime() - 31*3600*24);

works on 30.03.2012

Answer 4

The best solution I have found is this:

function subtracMonth($currentMonth, $monthsToSubtract){
        $finalMonth = $currentMonth;
        for($i=0;$i<$monthsToSubtract;$i++) {
            $finalMonth--;
            if ($finalMonth=='0'){
                $finalMonth = '12';
            }

        }
        return $finalMonth;

    }

So if we are in 3(March) and we want to subtract 5 months that would be

subtractMonth(3,5);

which would give 10(October). If the year is also desired, one could do this:

function subtracMonth($currentMonth, $monthsToSubtract){
    $finalMonth = $currentMonth;
    $totalYearsToSubtract = 0;
    for($i=0;$i<$monthsToSubtract;$i++) {
        $finalMonth--;
        if ($finalMonth=='0'){
            $finalMonth = '12';
            $totalYearsToSubtract++;
        }

    }
    //Get $currentYear
    //Calculate $finalYear = $currentYear - $totalYearsToSubtract 
    //Put resulting $finalMonth and $finalYear into an object as attributes
    //Return the object

}

Answer 5

Found this one wrong when the previous months is shorter than current.

echo date("Y-m-d H:i:s",strtotime("-1 month"));

Try on March the 30th and you will get 2012-03-01 instead of 2012-02...

Working out on better solution...

Answer 6

You can use strtotime, which is great in this kind of situations :

$timestamp = strtotime('-1 month');
var_dump(date('Y-m', $timestamp));

Will get you :

string '2009-11' (length=7)