Checking For Leap Year Using PHP

By  on  

One part of programming that seems pretty static is dealing with dates. The calendar is a set system of rules that doesn't look to change. The only part of the calendar that can be variable is a leap year, which changes every four years (obviously).

Using pure PHP ternary logic, much like the PHP Function - Calculating Days In A Month, I posted a few weeks back, you can check to see if a year is a leap year.

The Code

function is_leap_year($year) {
	return ((($year % 4) == 0) && ((($year % 100) != 0) || (($year % 400) == 0)));
}

Recent Features

  • By
    5 Awesome New Mozilla Technologies You’ve Never Heard Of

    My trip to Mozilla Summit 2013 was incredible.  I've spent so much time focusing on my project that I had lost sight of all of the great work Mozillians were putting out.  MozSummit provided the perfect reminder of how brilliant my colleagues are and how much...

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos

    As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us.  Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos.  Another technology available...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    How to Create a Twitter Card

    One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook.  Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...

  • By
    Redacted Font

    Back when I created client websites, one of the many things that frustrated me was the initial design handoff.  It would always go like this: Work hard to incorporate client's ideas, dream up awesome design. Create said design, using Lorem Ipsum text Send initial design concept to the client...

Discussion

  1. Placing a function call as an argument default will result in a fatal error. Also, give this version a shot:

    function is_leap_year( $year = NULL )
    {
        if_numeric( $year ) || $year = date( 'Y' );
        return checkdate( 2, 29, ( int ) $year );
    }
  2. Whoops, small typo… if_numeric( $year ) should be is_numeric( $year )… :x

  3. Tamlyn

    Better yet, use date('L') which returns 1 if it’s a leap year, 0 if it isn’t.

  4. I do agree with tamlyn, why you dont use date function??
    It can makes a load fasting right?

  5. Travis

    date(‘L’) is way better because leap year is not every 4 years.

  6. Date("L") only tell you in a given year, default is the year today.
    If you need to know whether previous or next year is a leap, you must reset the date.
    It could affect the system.

    • Indra, you can always pass the timestamp as second parameter to date function:

      echo date('L', mktime(1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2005));
      
  7. I think this is a better example relating to the function. Also provided example for anyone looking for true/false as I was in this instance.

    /* for true or false */
    function is_leap_year($year)
    {
    	return ( date ('L', mktime(1,1,1,1,1, $year) ) === 1 ) ? true : false;
    }
    /*for 0 or 1 Whether it's a leap year: 1 if it is a leap year, 0 otherwise. */
    function is_leap_year($year)
    {
    	return date ('L', mktime(1,1,1,1,1, $year) );		
    }
    
  8. Habibur Rahaman
    <?php
    $day = "";
    for($i=0; $i<4; $i++)
    {
        $day =  date("d", mktime(0, 0, 0, 2, 29, date("Y")+$i));
        if($day == 29)
        {
            $year = date("Y")+$i;
            break;
        }
    }
    echo "The next leap year is 29th February $year";    
    ?>
    
    
  9. Milan Dvořák

    code of Habibur Rahaman will not work for example for the year 1897, because 1900 is not leap year.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!