PHP DateTime::modify adding and subtracting months

Question

I've been working a lot with the DateTime class and recently ran into what I thought was a bug when adding months. After a bit of research, it appears that it wasn't a bug, but instead working as intended. According to the documentation found here:

Example #2 Beware when adding or subtracting months

<?php
$date = new DateTime('2000-12-31');

$date->modify('+1 month');
echo $date->format('Y-m-d') . "\n";

$date->modify('+1 month');
echo $date->format('Y-m-d') . "\n";
?>

The above example will output:
2001-01-31
2001-03-03

Can anyone justify why this isn't considered a bug?

Furthermore does anyone have any elegant solutions to correct the issue and make it so +1 month will work as expected instead of as intended?

Answer 1

My solution to the problem:

$startDate = new \DateTime( '2015-08-30' );
$endDate = clone $startDate;

$billing_count = '6';
$billing_unit = 'm';

$endDate->add( new \DateInterval( 'P' . $billing_count . strtoupper( $billing_unit ) ) );

if ( intval( $endDate->format( 'n' ) ) > ( intval( $startDate->format( 'n' ) ) + intval( $billing_count ) ) % 12 )
{
    if ( intval( $startDate->format( 'n' ) ) + intval( $billing_count ) != 12 )
    {
        $endDate->modify( 'last day of -1 month' );
    }
}

Answer 2

Here is an implementation of an improved version of Juhana's answer in a related question:

<?php
function sameDateNextMonth(DateTime $createdDate, DateTime $currentDate) {
    $addMon = clone $currentDate;
    $addMon->add(new DateInterval("P1M"));

    $nextMon = clone $currentDate;
    $nextMon->modify("last day of next month");

    if ($addMon->format("n") == $nextMon->format("n")) {
        $recurDay = $createdDate->format("j");
        $daysInMon = $addMon->format("t");
        $currentDay = $currentDate->format("j");
        if ($recurDay > $currentDay && $recurDay <= $daysInMon) {
            $addMon->setDate($addMon->format("Y"), $addMon->format("n"), $recurDay);
        }
        return $addMon;
    } else {
        return $nextMon;
    }
}

This version takes $createdDate under the presumption that you are dealing with a recurring monthly period, such as a subscription, that started on a specific date, such as the 31st. It always takes $createdDate so late "recurs on" dates won't shift to lower values as they are pushed forward thru lesser-valued months (e.g., so all 29th, 30th or 31st recur dates won't eventually get stuck on the 28th after passing thru a non-leap-year February).

Here is some driver code to test the algorithm:

$createdDate = new DateTime("2015-03-31");
echo "created date = " . $createdDate->format("Y-m-d") . PHP_EOL;

$next = sameDateNextMonth($createdDate, $createdDate);
echo "   next date = " . $next->format("Y-m-d") . PHP_EOL;

foreach(range(1, 12) as $i) {
    $next = sameDateNextMonth($createdDate, $next);
    echo "   next date = " . $next->format("Y-m-d") . PHP_EOL;
}

Which outputs:

created date = 2015-03-31
   next date = 2015-04-30
   next date = 2015-05-31
   next date = 2015-06-30
   next date = 2015-07-31
   next date = 2015-08-31
   next date = 2015-09-30
   next date = 2015-10-31
   next date = 2015-11-30
   next date = 2015-12-31
   next date = 2016-01-31
   next date = 2016-02-29
   next date = 2016-03-31
   next date = 2016-04-30

Answer 3

If using strtotime() just use $date = strtotime('first day of +1 month');

Answer 4

If you just want to avoid skipping a month you can perform something like this to get the date out and run a loop on the next month reducing the date by one and rechecking until a valid date where $starting_calculated is a valid string for strtotime (i.e. mysql datetime or "now"). This finds the very end of the month at 1 minute to midnight instead of skipping the month.

    $start_dt = $starting_calculated;

    $next_month = date("m",strtotime("+1 month",strtotime($start_dt)));
    $next_month_year = date("Y",strtotime("+1 month",strtotime($start_dt)));

    $date_of_month = date("d",$starting_calculated);

    if($date_of_month>28){
        $check_date = false;
        while(!$check_date){
            $check_date = checkdate($next_month,$date_of_month,$next_month_year);
            $date_of_month--;
        }
        $date_of_month++;
        $next_d = $date_of_month;
    }else{
        $next_d = "d";
    }
    $end_dt = date("Y-m-$next_d 23:59:59",strtotime("+1 month"));

Answer 5

$month = 1; $year = 2017;
echo date('n', mktime(0, 0, 0, $month + 2, -1, $year));

will output 2 (february). will work for other months too.

Answer 6

$ds = new DateTime();
$ds->modify('+1 month');
$ds->modify('first day of this month');