PHP: date function to get month of the current date

What does your "data variable" look like? If it's like this:

$mydate = "2010-05-12 13:57:01";

You can simply do:

$month = date("m",strtotime($mydate));

For more information, take a look at date and strtotime.

EDIT:

To compare with an int, just do a date_format($date,"n"); which will give you the month without leading zero.

Alternatively, try one of these:

if((int)$month == 1)...
if(abs($month) == 1)...

Or something weird using ltrim, round, floor... but date_format() with "n" would be the best.

See http://php.net/date

date('m') or date('n') or date('F') ...

Update

m Numeric representation of a month, with leading zeros 01 through 12

n Numeric representation of a month, without leading zeros 1 through 12

F Alphabetic representation of a month January through December

....see the docs link for even more options.