php - for loop for each month of year - php

Question

I want a loop that checks the current month, 12 months in the future and 4 months in the past.
For example: Today is 1st August 08. My loop should go through April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December, January, February, March, April, May, June, July, and August.
I have tried strotime but I don't know how I can loop 4 months back and 12 months in the future.
Here is my code
$i = 1;
$month = strtotime('2013-08-01');
while($i <= 12) {
$month_name = date('F', $month);
echo $month_name;
echo "<br>";
$month = strtotime('+1 month', $month);
$i++;

Answer 1

I think Yoshi was almost there with his answer, but using DatePeriod with DateTime is more consistent and makes for more readable code IMHO:-
$oneMonth = new \DateInterval('P1M');
$startDate = \DateTime::createFromFormat('d H:i:s', '1 00:00:00')->sub(new \DateInterval('P4M'));
$period = new \DatePeriod($startDate, $oneMonth, 16);
foreach($period as $date){
//$date is an instance of \DateTime. I'm just var_dumping it for illustration
var_dump($date);
}
See it working

Answer 2

This can be quite tricky, here's how I would do it:
$month = date("n", "2013-08-01") - 1; // -1 to get 0-11 so we can do modulo
// since you want to go back 4 you can't just do $month - 4, use module trick:
$start_month = $month + 8 % 12;
// +8 % 12 is the same is -4 but without negative value issues
// 2 gives you: 2+8%12 = 10 and not -2
for ($i = 0; $i < 16; $i += 1) {
$cur_month = ($start_month + $i) % 12 + 1; // +1 to get 1-12 range back
$month_name = date('F Y', strtotime($cur_month . " months"));
var_dump(month_name);
}

Answer 3

something like this?:
$start = -4;
$end = 12;
for($i=$start; $i<=$end;$i++) {
$month_name = date('F Y', strtotime("$i months"));
echo $month_name;
echo "<br>";
}

Answer 4

Your code, just slightly modified.
date_default_timezone_set('UTC');
$i = 1;
$month = strtotime('-4 month');
while($i <= 16) {
$month_name = date('F', $month);
echo $month_name;
echo "<br>";
$month = strtotime('+1 month', $month);
$i++;
}

Answer 5

Simplest solution:
for($i=-4; $i<=12; $i++) {
echo date("F",strtotime( ($i > 0) ? "+$i months" : "$i months") )."\n";
}
Explanation:
The loop starts at -4 and goes all the way upto 12 (total 17, including 0). The ternary statement inside strtotime() simply checks if $i is positive, and if it is, a + is inserted so that we'll get the results for strtotime("+1 months") and similar.
Ta-da!

Answer 6

Using DateTime is the easiest and more readable way.
I would do it like this:
$from = new DateTime('-4 month');
$to = new DateTime('+12 month');
while($from < $to){
echo $from->modify('+1 month')->format('F');
}