date - 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 months will be Sep 2010 - July 2011. To do this, I am using:

for ($i = 1; $i <= 12; $i++)
    $months[] = date("Y-m%", strtotime("-$i months"));

The code above works just fine on August 30. I get the last 12 months:

array
    0 => string '2011-07%' (length=8)
    1 => string '2011-06%' (length=8)
    2 => string '2011-05%' (length=8)
    3 => string '2011-04%' (length=8)
    4 => string '2011-03%' (length=8)
    5 => string '2011-02%' (length=8)
    6 => string '2011-01%' (length=8)
    7 => string '2010-12%' (length=8)
    8 => string '2010-11%' (length=8)
    9 => string '2010-10%' (length=8)
    10 => string '2010-09%' (length=8)
    11 => string '2010-08%' (length=8)

But when I run this on Aug 31, I get:

array
    0 => string '2011-07%' (length=8)
    1 => string '2011-07%' (length=8)
    2 => string '2011-05%' (length=8)
    3 => string '2011-05%' (length=8)
    4 => string '2011-03%' (length=8)
    5 => string '2011-03%' (length=8)
    6 => string '2011-01%' (length=8)
    7 => string '2010-12%' (length=8)
    8 => string '2010-12%' (length=8)
    9 => string '2010-10%' (length=8)
    10 => string '2010-10%' (length=8)
    11 => string '2010-08%' (length=8)

I have tried both Windows and Unix. Does anyone have a solution for this?

Answer 1

I'm sure someone has a more elegant solution, but you could start counting backwards from the 1st of this month.

for ($i = 1; $i <= 12; $i++) {
    $months[] = date("Y-m%", strtotime( date( 'Y-m-01' )." -$i months"));
}