Getting last month's date in php

user_43035 0
Viewed 202388

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 should use strtotime, mktime. Something to the timestamp? Do I need to add something afterwards to reset so that the date isn't set to last month throughout everything for all timestamps on my site? I'm trying to RTM but it's hard for me to figure this out.

date php
18 Answers
echo strtotime("-1 month");

That will output the timestamp for last month exactly. You don't need to reset anything afterwards. If you want it in an English format after that, you can use date() to format the timestamp, ie:

echo date("Y-m-d H:i:s",strtotime("-1 month"));
user_812050 
$prevmonth = date('M Y', strtotime("last month"));
user_1493950

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...

user_13026990 
echo date('Y',strtotime("-1 year"));        //last year<br>
echo date('d',strtotime("-1 day"));     //last day<br>
echo date('m',strtotime("-1 month"));       //last month<br>
user_10411180

Oh I figured this out, please ignore unless you have the same problem i did in which case:

$prevmonth = date("M Y",mktime(0,0,0,date("m")-1,1,date("Y")));
user_430350

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)
user_1384750 
$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

user_13029180

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

}
user_14089410

It works for me:

Today is: 31/03/2012

echo date("Y-m-d", strtotime(date('m', mktime() - 31*3600*24).'/01/'.date('Y').' 00:00:00')); // 2012-02-01
echo  date("Y-m-d", mktime() - 31*3600*24); // 2012-02-29
user_13052490

Simply get last month.

Example:

Today is: 2020-09-02

Code:

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

Result:

2020-08-02

user_18999960
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