Problem with date

[Anon]

Dear All,
In my work, I got a date value from a text file and it is in the form of "2002-04-01 10:00:00"(i.e., in the form of yyyy-mon-dd hh:mm:ss). I have to subtract some value from the day of the above field say one or two. If it is middle of the month it is acceptable. But if it is first day of any month, I have to change this field to previous month last date. How can I handle this? Can any body help me in this issue?

regards,
Indrajit

[Anon]

convert the values to UNIX timestamps and then do simple subtraction.

lets say $text is the date from your text file and you want to go back 1 day.

<?
$text = '2002-04-01 10:00:00';
$timestamp = strtotime ($text );
$timestamp -= 86400;
// 86400 is the # of seconds in a day
$new_date = date ('Y-m-d H:i:s', $timestamp);
echo $new_date;
?>

This would ouput "2002-03-31 10:00:00"