Get dates Saturday to Friday previous

[code green]

I need to generate the date for the latest Friday and the Saturday previous to this ie 7 days.

I am generating reports for the periods Yesterday, Month to date and Sat-Fri so I create the dates in PHP and pass them to a function to be used in the BETWEEN phrase of a query.

This could run almost any day of the week but most probably the Friday itself.
I have figured it out for yesterday

$start = date('Y-m-d',strtotime('-1 day'));
$finish = date('Y-m-d',strtotime('-1 day'));

And month to date

$start = date('Y-m-01');
$finish = date('Y-m-d');

But I also need $start to be Saturdays date and $finish to be Friday. I probably need one of date('D') date('l') or date('N') which return text or numeric representations of the day of the week but can't figure out how

[code green]

Well here is the solution

$fri = 5;
$stmp = time(); #Get current timestamp
$day = date('N',$stmp); #Get numeric day of week 
while($day != $fri) #Match to Friday
{
    $stmp = $stmp - 86400; #subtract i day
    $day = date('N',$stmp); #Get numeric day of week 
}
$finish = date('Y-m-d',$stmp);#Fridays date
$start = date('Y-m-d',$stmp - (86400*7)); #7 days previous
 

Thanks for all the help ;)

[Dormilich]

@code green
the same without a function call:

$stmp = $_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME'];

I love to help. ;)

[code green]

Is the server request more efficient than the function call Dormilich?

[Dormilich]

@code green
at least the Zend people say so (but it does make sense).

[Markus]

@Dormilich
But REQUEST_TIME is set when a request is made to the SAPI, and never updated through the lifetime of the script - that could lead to inconsistent results if you, say:

sleep(60 * 60 * 24 * 7);
 

slept for a week?

;)

[Dormilich]

@Markus
well, most scripts finish within a second.

I don't understand your example... but most of the time you just need a current timestamp. and yes, there may be cases where it could be problematic, though I consider code green smart enough to realise that.

[Markus]

@Dormilich
It was a joke ;)

[Dormilich]

@Markus
at least better than what I'm up to now (determine the LCD (Limiting Current Density)--another boring 2 or 3 hours of waiting and measuring)