strtotime("next march")

Question

Going through a weird problem here.

I am trying to get the date of coming March, but it doesn't seem to work.

$nextMarch = strtotime("next march");

What could be wrong with this tiny little code?

This is a question related to this question:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1872812/timestamp-of-nearest-valid-month

Answer 1

strtotime() is not that smart. You can only do weekdays with next or last.

Answer 2

I think you'll have to give strtotime some other (and/or additional) information.

For instance, the number of the day you want in march :

$nextMarch = strtotime("1 march");
var_dump($nextMarch, date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $nextMarch));

But you'll get march this year :

int 1235862000
string '2009-03-01 00:00:00' (length=19)

So, to get "next" march, i.e., next year :

$nextMarch = strtotime("1 march +1 year");
var_dump($nextMarch, date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $nextMarch));

And you get :

int 1267398000
string '2010-03-01 00:00:00' (length=19)

So, maybe you'll have to do some calculation by yourself, to know whether you want this year or the next one. Something like this might do the trick:

$nextMarch = strtotime("1 march");
if ($nextMarch < time()) {
  $nextMarch = strtotime("1 march +1 year");
}
var_dump($nextMarch, date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $nextMarch));

(I don't really like this idea, but it seems to be working -- even though a simpler solution would definitely be nice...)

Answer 3

What do you mean 'date of coming March'? March is a collection of 31 dates (one for each day).

Anyway, this example of strtotime() (from the online Manual) uses 'next month', to return "the last day of the current month"

It might be worth a look.

Answer 4

I'd be inclined to do more mangling myself and rely less on strtotime:

$thisYear = date("Y");
$nextYear = $thisYear + 1;
$nextMarch = date($yourFormat, strtotime("March 1, $nextYear"));

Answer 5

Using strtotime here seems a bit odd and weird for me. I'd prefer using mktime for this.

mktime (0,0,0,3,1,date("Y")+1);