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PHP 5.2 -- Today's date - 7 days

How do I say:
$StartDate = Today's Date - 7 Days
in PHP 5.2?

I've seen stuff where the date is decomposed into month, day, year, subtracted and re-assembled. But that looks like August 5th - 7 days would come out to August -2nd ... which isn't really valid.

I was trying the DateTime::sub routine, but then found that my host is running 5.2, not 5.3.

I know this is a common need ... how is it done?

Thanks!

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gr8gonzo

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SOLUTION

Guy Hengel [angelIII / a3]

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SOLUTION

gr8gonzo

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Daniel Wilson

ASKER

gr8gonzo, your code snippet worked great (once I corrected a little misspelling). Thanks!
07/14/2009

angelIII, yours gives me something funny ... but thanks for the shot at it!
1247582822

gr8gonzo

Ah - sorry. My laptop keyboard at home sometimes repeats characters that I type.

angelll's suggestion technically works. It simply returned a unix timestamp. The strtotime() function takes a formatted date or English description of a date and changes it into a timestamp:

$januaryFirst2009Timestamp = strtotime("01/01/2009");
print date("m/d/Y",$januaryFirst2009Timestamp);

That code basically converts a date into a timestamp and then converts it back to the date again. Not really a useful piece of code, but it's a good illustration of converting back-and-forth between dates and timestamps.

Try date-formatting angelll's code:
echo date("m/d/Y",strtotime("-1 week"));