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

How can I find the first and last date in a month using PHP? For example, today is April 21, 2010; I want to find April 1, 2010 and April 30, 2010.

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

Simple one

• Y - A full numeric representation of a year, 4 digits
• m - Numeric representation of a month, with leading zeros
• t - Number of days in the given month

Reference - http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

<?php
    echo 'First Date    = ' . date('Y-m-01') . '<br />';
    echo 'Last Date     = ' . date('Y-m-t')  . '<br />';
?>

Solution 3:

You can use the date function to find how many days in a month there are.

// Get the timestamp for the date/month in question.
$ts = strtotime('April 2010');

echo date('t', $ts); 
// Result: 30, therefore, April 30, 2010 is the last day of that month.

Hope that helps.

EDIT: After reading Luis' answer, it occurred to me you may want it in the right format (YY-mm-dd). It may be obvious, but doesn't hurt to mention:

// After the above code
echo date('Y-m-t', $ts);