When is Columbus Day?

In the United States we celebrate Columbus Day on the second Monday of October each year. While there is not a specific PHP function to generate what day this is (like Easter has) we can determine it using this script. Be sure to read the italic comments to better understand how the script is working!

<?php
//This gets today's date
$date =time () ;

//This makes the current year a variable
$year = date('Y', $date) ;

//Here we generate the first day of October
$first_day = mktime(0,0,0,10, 1, $year) ;

//We determine what day of the week the first falls on
$day_of_week = date('D', $first_day) ;

//Based upon this, we add the appropriate number of days to get to the second Tuesday of the month

switch($day_of_week){
case "Sun": $add = 8; break;
case "Mon": $add = 7; break;
case "Tue": $add = 13; break;
case "Wed": $add = 12; break;
case "Thu": $add = 11; break;
case "Fri": $add = 10; break;
case "Sat": $add = 9; break;
}

$Columbus = 1 + $add;

echo "This year, $year, Columbus day falls on 10/$Columbus.";
?>

This script uses the date () and time () functions to find the current year. You could also manually input a year if you prefered to find Columbus day for a different year. Once we determine what day the first of October falls on we can use a switch loop to add the appropriate amount of days to find the second Monday. Finally we echo () our result to our user.