how to get the date of last week's (tuesday or any other day) in php?

Question

I think its possible but i cant come up with the right algorithm for it.

What i wanted to do was:

If today is monday feb 2 2009, how would i know the date of last week's tuesday? Using that same code 2 days after, i would find the same date of last week's tuesday with the current date being wednesday, feb 4 2009.

Answer 1

PHP actually makes this really easy:

echo strtotime('last Tuesday');

http://uk2.php.net/strtotime

Answer 2

I know there is an accepted answer already, but imho it does not meet the second requirement that was asked for. In the above case, strtotime would yield yesterday if used on a wednesday. So, just to be exact you would still need to check for this:

$tuesday = strtotime('last Tuesday');
// check if we need to go back in time one more week
$tuesday = date('W', $tuesday)==date('W') ? $tuesday-7*86400 : $tuesday;

---

As davil pointed out in his comment, this was kind of a quick-shot of mine. The above calculation will be off by one once a year due to daylight saving time. The good-enough solution would be:

$tuesday = date('W', $tuesday)==date('W') ? $tuesday-7*86400+7200 : $tuesday;

If you need the time to be 0:00h, you'll need some extra effort of course.

Answer 3

you forgot strtotime for second argument of date('W', $tuesday) hmm.

convert $tuesday to timestamp before "$tuesday-7*86400+7200"

mde.

Answer 4

Working solution:

$z = date("Y-m-d", strtotime("last Saturday"));
$z = (date('W', strtotime($z)) == date('W')) ? (strtotime($z)-7*86400+7200) : strtotime($z);
print date("Y-m-d", $z);

Answer 5

Any idea on how to get date of last Saturday (or any other day) in MySQL?