Question

for verification as a bug, can someone test this with his php:

$timeZone = new DateTimeZone('Europe/Berlin');
$startDate = new DateTime('first day this month 00:00:00', $timeZone);
echo $startDate->format('d.m.Y');

Result:

02.02.2013

I’ve tested it with php 5.2 and PHP 5.3, with same result….

As a “resolution”, what’s the best alternate way to do this?

$timeZone = new DateTimeZone('Europe/Berlin');
$startDateAlt = new DateTime('now', $timeZone);
$startDateAlt->setTimestamp(mktime(0, 0, 0, date("m") , 1, date("Y")));

Answer 1

You omitted the of, so it parses it as something else:

$timeZone = new DateTimeZone('Europe/Berlin');
$startDate = new DateTime('first day of this month 00:00:00', $timeZone);
echo $startDate->format('d.m.Y');

returns

01.02.2013

If for some reason this doesn’t work (old php version it seems from your comment), you can try this? Bit of a hack maybe…

$startDate = new DateTime();
$days = $startDate->format('d');
$days = $days - 1;
$startDate->modify("-{$day} days");
$startDate->setTime(0,0,0);
echo $startDate->format('d.m.Y');