Get last month’s date range in PHP

I needed to get last month’s valid date range in php for running reports. A quick google search showed the top results for accomplishing this used for loops that subtracted/added days from now until casting as a date object returned false.

Needless to say, no way am I doing that. So below I have a code snippet that returns the valid start and end date of the previous month. This could be modified in a variety of ways to suit your needs. Needless to say I was disappointed that strtotime did not accept “First day of last month”.

| 12345678910 | // this returns a date string which I need, but removing the casting as a date// returns a unix timestamp value more useful for calculations$first_of_last_month = date('m/d/y',mktime(0,0,0,date('m')-1,1,date('y')));$end_of_last_month = date('m/d/y',mktime(0,0,0,date('m'),0,date('y'))); // if run on 03/01/11var_dump($first_of_last_month, $end_of_last_month);// outputs// string(8) "02/01/11"// string(8) "02/28/11" | | — | — |

Author’s Note

Initial md Generated using https://github.com/jsr6720/wordpress-html-scraper-to-md

Original Wordpress categories: [‘PHP’]

Original Wordpress tags: “PHP”, “date”, “monthly date range”, “php”

Original Wordpress comments: 2 Comments

Significant revisions

tags: 2011, wordpress, txcowboycoder, php, date-ranges

May 6th, 2024 Converted to jekyll markdown format and copied to personal site
Feb 10th, 2011 Originally published on txcowboycoder wordpress site