PHP - Fetch Previous Month from Current Month

Question

I need to fetch previous month from the current month passed. Tried below code and it does work for the month having 30 days but does not work for specific months having 31 days viz. March, May, July, October and December

Note: The question may sound repeated, but please read it completely till the end. You can check the same issue by changing the system and testing below code against it. I need the previous month output in format Jul

For Date: 30-Jul output is

Previous Month-Jun Current Month-Jul

For Date: 31-Jul output is

Previous Month-Jul Current Month-Jul

$prev_month = date('M', strtotime("last month")); echo 'Previous Month--'.$prev_month; echo 'Current Month--'.date('M');

Also tried echo date('M', strtotime("-1 Months")); but it outputs the same as above.

If current month is (August) with 31 days and so previous month is (July) with 31 days then it works and shows correct Previous Month ie July , but it does not work if current month has 31 days and previous month has 30 or lesser days.

How should I go about it to fetch correct previous month on the basis of current month ?

Answer 1

You simply try as

echo "Previous Month".date('M',strtotime('first day of last month'));

and for specific date you can simply use

echo date('M',strtotime('first day of last month',strtotime('30-Jun')));//May

Answer 2

You should pass in the date from the start of the month.

$startDate = date('Y-m-1');
$prevMonth = date('M', strtotime("last month", strtotime($startDate)));

see PHP date() and strtotime() return wrong months on 31st