Getting last month's date in php

Question

I want to get last month\'s date. I wrote this out:

$prevmonth = date(\'M Y\');

Which gives me the current month/year. I can\'t tell if I

Answer 1

The best solution I have found is this:

function subtracMonth($currentMonth, $monthsToSubtract){
        $finalMonth = $currentMonth;
        for($i=0;$i<$monthsToSubtract;$i++) {
            $finalMonth--;
            if ($finalMonth=='0'){
                $finalMonth = '12';
            }

        }
        return $finalMonth;

    }

So if we are in 3(March) and we want to subtract 5 months that would be

subtractMonth(3,5);

which would give 10(October). If the year is also desired, one could do this:

function subtracMonth($currentMonth, $monthsToSubtract){
    $finalMonth = $currentMonth;
    $totalYearsToSubtract = 0;
    for($i=0;$i<$monthsToSubtract;$i++) {
        $finalMonth--;
        if ($finalMonth=='0'){
            $finalMonth = '12';
            $totalYearsToSubtract++;
        }

    }
    //Get $currentYear
    //Calculate $finalYear = $currentYear - $totalYearsToSubtract 
    //Put resulting $finalMonth and $finalYear into an object as attributes
    //Return the object

}