How to get the first day of the current year?

Question

I need to use PHP DateTime to get the first day of the current year. I've tried:

$year = new DateTime('first day of this year'); var_dump($year); 

But this seems to be returning the first day of the current month: 2014-09-01 09:28:56

Why? How do I correctly get the first day of the current year?

Answer 1

Your relative date format 'first day of this year' is correct by returning the first day of the month because of the definition of first day of:

Sets the day of the first of the current month. This phrase is best used together with a month name following it. (See PHP-doc)

To get the first day of the current year with the relative format you can use something like this:

'first day of January ' . date('Y') 

Answer 2

Or use only text in the strtotime function:

date('Y-m-d', strtotime('first day of january this year'));