Getting last month's date in php

Question

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 RTFM but it's hard for me to figure this out.

Answer 1

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"));

Answer 2

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")));

Answer 3

$prevmonth = date('M Y', strtotime("last month"));

Answer 4

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)