Question

I have an action which accepts a year and an optional month. I need to query all articles written within that time, so I need the absolute first and last valid datetime for that timespan.

    $start = new \DateTime();
    $start->setDate((int) $year, (int) ($month ?: 1), 1);
    $start->setTime(0, 0);

    $end = clone $start;
    $end->add(new \DateInterval($month ? 'P1M' : 'P1Y'));
    $end->sub(new \DateInterval('PT1S'));

Is there a cleaner way to write this?

Answer 1

$start = mktime(0, 0, 0, $month ?: 1, 1, $year);
$end = mktime(23, 59, 59, $month ?: 12, $month ? date('t', $start) : 31, $year);

or

$start = new \DateTime("$year-" . ($month ?: 1) . '-1 00:00:00');
$end = new \DateTime("$year-" . ($month ?: 12) . '-' . ($month ? $start->format('t') : 31) . ' 23:59:59');

Not sure if you’d consider this cleaner, but it’s shorter and does without relative calculations.

The cleanest and most understandable way to write this is probably:

if ($month) {
    $start = new \DateTime("$year-$month-1 00:00:00");
    $end   = new \DateTime("$year-$month-" . $start->format('t') . ' 23:59:59');
} else {
    $start = new \DateTime("$year-1-1 00:00:00");
    $end   = new \DateTime("$year-12-31 23:59:59");
}

You might not need to involve DateTime much at all here if you’re going to use this as value for an SQL query.