Get a List of Years and Months in a Date Range with PHP

I can’t find the initial inspiration for this to link to – sorry. I came across a forum post or maybe a blog post where someone needed to do something like return an array of the months (or maybe it was days or something) in a given date range. I had a place where I could’ve potentially used a similar bit of code, so I wrote this, and when I was done, I realized it was much nicer than the code I had started with, but lost the link to go back and post the code there. In the event that this is useful to someone, I’ll post it here 🙂

UPDATE: Don’t ask me why my WP SyntaxHighlighter plugin refused to preserve the indentation in this code. I haven’t a clue. If you do, post a comment to share the clue.

<?php

function get_months($startstring, $endstring)
{
$time1  = strtotime($startstring);//absolute date comparison needs to be done here, because PHP doesn't do date comparisons
$time2  = strtotime($endstring);
$my1     = date('mY', $time1); //need these to compare dates at 'month' granularity
$my2    = date('mY', $time2);
$year1 = date('Y', $time1);
$year2 = date('Y', $time2);
$years = range($year1, $year2);

foreach($years as $year)
{
$months&#91;$year&#93; = array();
while($time1 < $time2)
{
if(date('Y',$time1) == $year)
{
$months&#91;$year&#93;&#91;&#93; = date('m', $time1);
$time1 = strtotime(date('Y-m-d', $time1).' +1 month');
}
else
{
break;
}
}
continue;
}

return $months;
}

?>

And here’s some sample code to make use of it:

<?php

$montharr = get_months('2003-01-04', '2005-09-18');
foreach(array_keys($montharr) as $year)
{
foreach($montharr&#91;$year&#93; as $month)
{
print "{$year}-{$month}\n";
}
}

?>