PHP date returning wrong Month on subtracting one month

Question

Current Date is 29th March 2017

When I subtract 2 months using PHP and I get January

$prevmonth = date(\'M\', strtotime(\'-2 months\'));         


        

Answer 1

As covered in the comments, there's no 29th Feb.

29th Feb becomes 1st March.

You may be better to get the current month number, -1 from it, and then get the textual representation.

$prevMonth = date('n') - 1;
$prevMonthText = date('M', mktime(0, 0, 0, $prevMonth, 10));

Or, you could use DateTime if your PHP version allows (it should).

$prevMonth = date('n') - 1;
$dateObj   = DateTime::createFromFormat('!m', $prevMonth);
$monthName = $dateObj->format('M'); // March

The only issue with this, that you might have spotted, is January will never return December. A quick ternary statement will catch that.

$prevMonth = ((date('n') - 1) < 1) ? 12 : date('n') - 1;

Answer 2

strtotime() uses 30 day months and there are only 28 in days in February (this year) so will not yield a valid date in February. You could use the current day d or j and subtract that which will always put you in the previous month (-29 days):

$prevmonth = date('M', strtotime('-' . date('d') . ' days'));

This will get December from January as well.