Simplest way to display current month and year like "Aug 2016" in PHP?

Sam picture Sam · Mar 18, 2011 · Viewed 189.7k times · Source

What is the shortest, simplest code to generate the curent month in Full English like September or in abbreviated three letter version like Feb and then add the current Year 2011?

So the code will, depending on the month and year, echo things like:

August 2016 or Aug 2016 etcettera. Thanks!

Answer

RDL picture RDL · Mar 18, 2011

Full version:

<? echo date('F Y'); ?>

Short version:

<? echo date('M Y'); ?>

Here is a good reference for the different date options.

update

To show the previous month we would have to introduce the mktime() function and make use of the optional timestamp parameter for the date() function. Like this:

echo date('F Y', mktime(0, 0, 0, date('m')-1, 1, date('Y')));

This will also work (it's typically used to get the last day of the previous month):

echo date('F Y', mktime(0, 0, 0, date('m'), 0, date('Y')));

Hope that helps.