Get the last 12 months in PHP

Question

So here is an interesting problem I learned today.

I need to populate an array with the last 12 months, starting with the past month. So in August 2011, the last 12

Answer 1

It's because not every month has a 31st. So strtotime() is advancing to the next month. i.e. 4/31 = 5/1.

You'd be better off using mktime() for this as it's dumber than strtotime().

UPDATE

To take advantage of a smart function like strtotime() and avoid tracking the year for mktime(), the following is my suggestion:

$month = time();
for ($i = 1; $i <= 12; $i++) {
  $month = strtotime('last month', $month);
  $months[] = date("r", $month);
}
print_r($months);

Adjust logic and optimize as you see fit.