Return dates of current calendar week as array in PHP5

Question

How would I put together a PHP5 function that would find the current calendar week and return the dates of each day in the week as an array, starting on Monday? For example,

Answer 1

Lessee. . First, to avoid any timezone issues I'd peg to noon on the day you want to compare against, so an hour either way won't cause any problems.

$dateCompare = time(); // replace with a parameter
$dateCompare = mktime(12, 0, 0, date('n', $dateCompare), 
      date('j', $dateCompare), date('Y', $dateCompare));

Then find the day of week of your date.

$dow = date('N', $dateCompare);

1 is Monday, so figure out how many days from Monday we are.

$days = $dow - 1;

Now subtract days worth of seconds until you get back to Monday.

$dateCompare -= (3600 * 24 * $days);

Now assemble your array of days.

$output = array();
for ($x = 0; $x < 7; $x++) {
    $output[$x] = $dateCompare + ($x * 24 * 3600);
}

This is an array of timestamps, but you could store the dates as strings if you prefer.

Answer 2

I suppose a solution would be to start by getting the timestamp that correspond to last monday, using strtotime :

$timestampFirstDay = strtotime('last monday');

But if you try with today (thursday), with something like this :

$timestampFirstDay = strtotime('last thursday');
var_dump(date('Y-m-d', $timestampFirstDay));

you'll get :

string '2010-02-18' (length=10)

i.e. last week... For strtotime, "last" means "the one before today".

Which mean you'll have to test if today is "last monday" as returned by strtotime plus one week -- and, if so, add one week...

Here's a possible (there are probably smarter ideas) solution :

$timestampFirstDay = strtotime('last monday');
if (date('Y-m-d', $timestampFirstDay) == date('Y-m-d', time() - 7*24*3600)) {
    // we are that day... => add one week
    $timestampFirstDay += 7 * 24 * 3600;
}

And now that we have the timestamp of "last monday", we can write a simple for loop that loops 7 times, adding 1 day each time, like this :

$currentDay = $timestampFirstDay;
for ($i = 0 ; $i < 7 ; $i++) {
    echo date('Y-m-d', $currentDay) . '<br />';
    $currentDay += 24 * 3600;
}

Which will give us this kind of output :

2010-02-22
2010-02-23
2010-02-24
2010-02-25
2010-02-26
2010-02-27
2010-02-28

Now, up to you to :

• Modify that for loop so it stores the dates in an array
• Decide which format you want to use for the date function

Have fun ;-)