How can I find the first and last date in a month using PHP?

by

The easiest way is to use date, which lets you mix hard-coded values with ones extracted from a timestamp. If you don’t give a timestamp, it assumes the current date and time.

// Current timestamp is assumed, so these find first and last day of THIS month
$first_day_this_month = date('m-01-Y'); // hard-coded '01' for first day
$last_day_this_month  = date('m-t-Y');

// With timestamp, this gets last day of April 2010
$last_day_april_2010 = date('m-t-Y', strtotime('April 21, 2010'));

date() searches the string it’s given, like 'm-t-Y', for specific symbols, and it replaces them with values from its timestamp. So we can use those symbols to extract the values and formatting that we want from the timestamp. In the examples above:

  • Y gives you the 4-digit year from the timestamp (‘2010’)
  • m gives you the numeric month from the timestamp, with a leading zero (’04’)
  • t gives you the number of days in the timestamp’s month (’30’)

You can be creative with this. For example, to get the first and last second of a month:

$timestamp    = strtotime('February 2012');
$first_second = date('m-01-Y 00:00:00', $timestamp);
$last_second  = date('m-t-Y 12:59:59', $timestamp); // A leap year!

See http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php for other symbols and more details.

More Related Contents:

  1. Php date() Date and time is stuck [closed]
  2. Days remaining before birthday in php [duplicate]
  3. How to get time difference in minutes in PHP
  4. How can I compare two dates in PHP?
  5. Add number of days to a date
  6. PHP DateTime::modify adding and subtracting months
  7. Accessing dates in PHP beyond 2038
  8. Date Difference in php on days? [duplicate]
  9. How to list all months between two dates
  10. PHP date() with timezone?
  11. Difference between 2 dates in seconds [duplicate]
  12. PHP convert date format dd/mm/yyyy => yyyy-mm-dd [duplicate]
  13. How can I check if the current date/time is past a set date/time?
  14. Day difference without weekends
  15. How to generate random date between two dates using php?
  16. How to count days between two dates in PHP?
  17. Print time in 15-minute increments between two times in the same day
  18. How to reformat date in PHP?
  19. Check for consecutive dates within a set and return as range
  20. Set timezone in PHP and MySQL
  21. PHP date() in foreign languages – e.g. Mar 25 Aoû 09 [duplicate]
  22. Adding three months to a date in PHP
  23. PHP date returning wrong Month on subtracting one month
  24. Get date range between two dates excluding weekends
  25. mysql – INSERT date range into date columns IF dates don’t overlap with existing ones
  26. PHP day of week numeric to day of week text
  27. adding 1 day to a DATETIME format value
  28. day of the week to day number (Monday = 1, Tuesday = 2)
  29. php weeks between 2 dates
  30. PHP: Date larger than current date

Leave a Comment