Question

I am trying to write a script that would work out the current academic year.

Academic year starts on Aug 1st every year.

How can i work out which Academic year we are in based on the current date.

ie
31st July 2012 (20120631) would work out as 2011/2012

13th Aug 2012 (20120801) would work out as 2012/2013

At the moment this is what I have, but its not very good as i dont want to define the dates and it does not return the correct academic year just the originally defined$academic_start_date.

function check_in_range($start_date, $end_date, $date_from_user)
{
  // Convert to timestamp
  $start_ts = strtotime($start_date);
  $end_ts = strtotime($end_date);
  $user_ts = strtotime($date_from_user);

  // Check that user date is between start & end
  return (($user_ts >= $start_ts) && ($user_ts <= $end_ts));
}


$academic_start_date = '20110801';
$academic_end_date = '20120731';
$startdate = '20120813';

$acyear_check = check_in_range($academic_start_date, $academic_end_date, $startdate);
if ($acyear_check == 1) { $acyear = $academic_start_date;}
else { $acyear = '';}

Answer 1

$time = ??;// here you put timestamp, it also may be strtotime(smth);

$year = date('Y', $time);
if(date('n', $time) < 8)
     $ayear = ($year - 1).'/'.$year;
else
    $ayear = ($year).'/'.($year + 1);

For your format:

$datestr = 'YYYYmmdd';
$year = substr($datestr, 0, 4);
if(intval(substr($datestr,4,2)) < 8)
     $ayear = ($year - 1).'/'.$year;
else
    $ayear = ($year).'/'.($year + 1);