Getting first weekday in a month with strtotime

I don't have any explanation as I'm also dazzled, but I managed to find out how you get the correct date by omitting the "first", like so:

$ php -r 'echo date("m/d/y", strtotime("December 2010 Wednesday"));'
12/01/10

$ php -r 'echo date("m/d/y", strtotime("December 2010 Thursday"));'
12/02/10

$ php -r 'echo date("m/d/y", strtotime("December 2010 Friday"));'
12/03/10

$ php -r 'echo date("m/d/y", strtotime("December 2010 Saturday"));'
12/04/10

$ php -r 'echo date("m/d/y", strtotime("December 2010 Sunday"));'
12/05/10

$ php -r 'echo date("m/d/y", strtotime("December 2010 Monday"));'
12/06/10

$ php -r 'echo date("m/d/y", strtotime("December 2010 Tuesday"));'
12/07/10

It's just your formatting that is incorrect. You need to include of:

echo strftime("%m/%d/%y", strtotime("first Monday of December 2010"));
echo strftime("%m/%d/%y", strtotime("first Tuesday of December 2010"));
echo strftime("%m/%d/%y", strtotime("first Wednesday of December 2010"));
echo strftime("%m/%d/%y", strtotime("first Thursday of December 2010"));
echo strftime("%m/%d/%y", strtotime("first Friday of December 2010"));
echo strftime("%m/%d/%y", strtotime("first Saturday of December 2010"));
echo strftime("%m/%d/%y", strtotime("first Sunday of December 2010"));

Prints:

12/06/10
12/07/10
12/01/10
12/02/10
12/03/10
12/04/10
12/05/10

The accepted solution works, but you would encounter problems if you wanted to find the second weekday:

echo strftime("%m/%d/%y", strtotime("December 2010 second Wednesday"));

Prints:

12/15/10

There are some examples given in the docs:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.formats.relative.php

The second block of notes in the above documentation explains how of affects the date calculation process:

Also observe that the "of" in "ordinal space dayname space 'of' " and "'last' space dayname space 'of' " does something special.

1. It sets the day-of-month to 1.
2. "ordinal dayname 'of' " does not advance to another day. (Example: "first tuesday of july 2008" means "2008-07-01").
3. "ordinal dayname " does advance to another day. (Example: "first tuesday july 2008" means "2008-07-08", see also point 4 in the list above).
4. "'last' dayname 'of' " takes the last dayname of the current month. (Example: "last wed of july 2008" means "2008-07-30")
5. "'last' dayname" takes the last dayname from the current day. (Example: "last wed july 2008" means "2008-06-25"; "july 2008" first sets the current date to "2008-07-01" and then "last wed" moves to the previous Wednesday which is "2008-06-25").

I found this note in the PHP manual.

"In PHP 5 prior to 5.2.7, requesting a given occurrence of a given weekday in a month where that weekday was the first day of the month would incorrectly add one week to the returned timestamp. This has been corrected in 5.2.7 and later versions."

Building off the answers provided, one needs to be aware of differences in relative date formatting between php 5.2 and php 5.3.

TEST:

$date1 = strtotime("first wednesday of 2010-12");
$date2 = strtotime("first wednesday 2010-12");
$date3 = strtotime("wednesday 2010-12");

5.2 Results:

1969-12-31
2010-12-08
2010-12-01

5.3 Results:

2010-12-01
2010-12-08
2010-12-01

Therefore only the third method returns correct results across PHP 5 versions.