Best way to get day-of-week occurance

Question

I need to determine a meeting date which convenes on the second Thursday of every month.

I've written the following code to do this:

//Determine next monthly meeting (occurs on 2nd thursday of each month)
define('MAX_POSSIBLE_SECOND_THURS', 14);
define('JANUARY', 1);
define('DECEMBER', 12);
define('THURSDAY', 4);

$current_month  =   intval(date('n'));
$next_month     =   $current_month == DECEMBER ? 1 : $current_month + 1;
$current_day    =   intval(date('j'));

$iThursdayCount =   0;
$month_to_use   =   $current_day <= MAX_POSSIBLE_SECOND_THURS ? $current_month : $next_month;
$year_to_use    =   $month_to_use <> JANUARY ? intval(date('Y')) : intval(date('Y')) + 1;
for ($iDay = 1; $iDay <= MAX_POSSIBLE_SECOND_THURS; $iDay++) {
        $date_to_check  =   strtotime($year_to_use.'-'.$month_to_use.'-'.$iDay);
        if(date('N', $date_to_check)== THURSDAY) {
        $iThursdayCount++;
        if ($iThursdayCount == 2)
           break;
    }
}

$next_meeting_date = $month_to_use.'/'.$iDay.'/'.$year_to_use;

echo $next_meeting_date;

Although the loop is small, it seems like a lot of work to determine the second Thursday. Are there any improvements that can be made? Or would you do something totally different?

Answer 1

Try the DateTime class. With this you can use relative formats:

new DateTime('second thu of next month');
new DateTime('second thu of jul');

That should make the code a lot easier.