Generate new date based on week+month of actual year

Question

Im developing a calendar with fixeds intervals. But there are 2 vacations on it, mid year and end year. Mid year vacation starts on 3° Monday of July of that actual year, and end year vacation starts on penultimate Monday of December of that actual year.

Is there any way I can get or generate this vacation dates?

The closest I found was something like this

$mid_vacation= date('w',strtotime($my_date.'Monday last week'));

Answer 1

There may be more ways, but the terms to follow all work as desired. I don't find instantiating a date class object to be as attractive because you don't need any of the extra functionality after generating the string. For this reason, I recommend strtotime() with date() . You are free to select which ever expression you wish depending on "readability", "brevity", or whatever criteria.

Code: ( Demo )

echo "3rd Monday of July: " , date("Y-m-d", strtotime("first Monday of July +2 weeks"));
echo "\n";
echo "3rd Monday of July: " , date("Y-m-d", strtotime("+2 weeks first Monday of July"));
echo "\n";
echo "3rd Monday of July: " , date("Y-m-d", strtotime("third Monday of July"));

echo "\n---\n";

echo "Penultimate / Second last Monday in December: " , date("Y-m-d", strtotime("last Monday of December this year -1 week"));
echo "\n";
echo "Penultimate / Second last Monday in December: " , date("Y-m-d", strtotime("-1 week last Monday of December"));

Output:

3rd Monday of July: 2019-07-15
3rd Monday of July: 2019-07-15
3rd Monday of July: 2019-07-15
---
Penultimate / Second last Monday in December: 2019-12-23
Penultimate / Second last Monday in December: 2019-12-23

*December seems to require this year in the first expression; @fyrye tells us why...

The issue with December is due to the usage of last|first dayname of when using + or - since it assumes you are specifying a timezone. See the notes on Relative statements are always processed after non-relative statements . You can use -7 days last Monday of December instead https://3v4l.org/KBrEs0
– fyrye

Answer 2

Check DateTime class

https://www.php.net/manual/en/class.datetime.php

$test = new DateTime('2019-07-01');
echo $test->modify('first monday')->format('Y-m-d');

$test = new DateTime('2019-12-01');
echo $test->modify('last monday of this month')->format('Y-m-d');