Getting last month's date in php

Question

I want to get last month's date. I wrote this out:

$prevmonth = date('M Y'); 

Which gives me the current month/year. I can't tell if I should use strtotime, mktime. Something to the timestamp? Do I need to add something afterwards to reset so that the date isn't set to last month throughout everything for all timestamps on my site? I'm trying to RTM but it's hard for me to figure this out.

Answer 1

It's simple to get last month date

echo date("Y-n-j", strtotime("first day of previous month")); echo date("Y-n-j", strtotime("last day of previous month")); 

at November 3 returns

2014-10-1 2014-10-31