PHP strtotime() different results of monday this week

Question

I have a problem getting the date of monday in the current week.

echo date('Y-m-d',strtotime('monday this week'));

When I'm running the above code on my local machine (PHP 5.3) it outputs correctly '2011-03-07', but the same code on my server (PHP 5.2) outputs '2011-03-14' (that's monday next week).

I've tried to run date('W') on both machines and I get the same result (10).

Edit: Any ideas how get this work correctly?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Use date('Y-m-d',strtotime(date('o-\\WW')));

Answer 2

Not that I've seen exactly this problem, but I've seen ones very similar. strtotime seems to change behaviour between different versions of PHP, and barring the simple operations (eg. '+1 week'), it's difficult to guarantee that functionality will remain the same.

If you're not able to upgrade to 5.3, which as correctly pointed out does seem to be an improvement, all I can recommend, is playing with some permutations. It's often possible to get the right answer out of older versions of strtotime by rephrasing the question. Examples might include ...

• next monday -1 week
• last monday +1 week
• this monday