Derived from this question : (Java) How does java do modulus calculations with negative numbers?
Anywhere to force PHP to return positive 51?
update
The modulo operation should find the remainder of division of a number by another. But strictly speaking in most mainstream programming languages the modulo operation malfunctions if dividend or/and divisor are negative. This includes PHP, Perl, Python, Java, C, C++, etc.
Why I say malfunction? Because according to mathematic definition, a remainder must be zero or positive.
The simple solution is to handle the case yourself:
if r < 0 then r = r + |divisor|;
|divisor| is the absolute value of divisor.
Another solution is to use a library (as @Gordon pointed). However I wouldn't use a library to handle a simple case like this.