Repeating Events on the “nth” Weekday of Every Month

Question

I\'ve looked at at least 2 dozen topics about this and haven\'t really found a good answer yet, so I come to you to ask once again for answers regarding the dreaded topic of

Answer 1

I have a more simple method, although it may seem hack-ish.

What we can do is take the start date, and infer it's "n" value from it by taking the ceiling of its day divided by 7.

For example, if your start date is the 18th, we divide by 7 and take the ceiling to infer that it is the 3rd "whatever-day" of the month.

From there we can simply repeatedly add 7 days to this to get a new date, and whenever the new date's ceilinged 7-quotient is 3, we've hit the next "nth whatever-day" of the month.

Some code can be seen below:

$day_nth = ceil(date("j", strtotime($date))/7);
for ($i = 0; $i < $number_of_repeats; $i++) {

    while (ceil(date("j", strtotime($date))/7) != $day_nth)
        $date = date("Y-m-d", strtotime("+7 days", strtotime($date)));

    /* Add your event, or whatever */

    /* Now we increment date by 7 days before the loop starts again,
    ** otherwise the while loop would never execute and we'd just be
    ** adding to the same date repeatedly. */
    $date = date("Y-m-d", strtotime("+7 days", strtotime($date)));
}

What's nice about this method is that we don't even have to concern ourselves with which day of the week we're dealing with. We just infer everything from the start date and away we go.