Tedd, This area was always a little grey to me. I have used -1 to obtain the previous months for some time now. 0 always indicated the beginning index of the current month but the explanation never seemed to fit the bill. Having worked extensively in time manipulation in many of the development projects I have come up with a rule of thumb. $this_month = date('Y-m-d 00:00:00',mktime(0,0,0,date('m'),1,date('Y'))); $previous_month = date('Y-m-d 00:00:00',mktime(0,0,0,date('m')-1,1,date('Y'))); $next_month = date('Y-m-d 00:00:00',mktime(0,0,0,date('m')+1,1,date('Y'))); To get the days of any given month or just about anything you need to just use the strtotime $days_in_month = date('j',strtotime($this_month)); -----Original Message----- From: Tedd Sperling [mailto:tedd.sperling@xxxxxxxxx] Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2012 3:04 PM To: PHP-General List Subject: Function mktime() documentation question Hi gang: I am using the getdate(mktime()) functions to get month data (i.e., name of month, first weekday, last day, number of days). To get the number of days for a specific month, I use: // $current_month is the month under question $next_month = $current_month + 1; $what_date = getdate(mktime(0, 0, 0, $next_month, 0, $year)); $days_in_current_month = $what_date['mday']; That works for me! However, if you read the documentation, namely: http://php.net/manual/en/function.mktime.php It states: --- quote day The number of the day relative to the end of the previous month. Values 1 to 28, 29, 30 or 31 (depending upon the month) reference the normal days in the relevant month. Values less than 1 (including negative values) reference the days in the previous month, so 0 is the last day of the previous month, -1 is the day before that, etc. Values greater than the number of days in the relevant month reference the appropriate day in the following month(s). --- un-quote >From my code, the number of days in a month can be found by using 0 as the first index of the next month -- not the last day of the previous month. As such, I would re-write the relevant portion of the paragraph to be: day The number of the day relative to the end of the previous month. Values 1 to 28, 29, 30 or 31 (depending upon the month) reference the normal days in the relevant month. Values less than 0 reference the days in the previous month. For example, -1 is the day before the first day of the relevant month. The value 0 is the zero index of the next month, which is also equal to the last day of the relevant month. Values greater than zero are the number of days in the relevant month reference the appropriate day in the following month(s). What say you? Cheers, tedd _____________________ tedd.sperling@xxxxxxxxx http://sperling.com -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php