Return local time from unix timestamp with timezone identifier in php

Question

I have a dropdown box on a webpage that takes a timezone identifier as the value (however I can change it to save the GMT offset if that is a better choice). Currently a user would be saving something like "America/Denver" as his / her time zone.

I need to convert a unix timestamp into the user's local time for display in another portion of the page. What is the best way to accomplish this?

Would it be better to store the GMT offset in the database and use that for a time calculation? Can someone please point me in the right direction here?

Thanks!

mario · Accepted Answer · 2011-03-22 21:25:14Z

5

The easiest approach would be to use DateTime with:

$t = new DateTime();
$t->setTimestamp( $time=time() );
$t->setTimeZone(new DateTimeZone("America/Denver"));
print $t->format(DateTime::RFC850);

The timezone can be changed at will to cause the format function to recalculate the local time.

answered Mar 22, 2011 at 21:25

mario

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10 Comments

mario Over a year ago

That's just a format string, like in date(). You can use any of those predefined in de.php.net/manual/en/class.datetime.php or supply your own ->format("d.M.y H:i:s");

ackerchez Over a year ago

So I tried to set up the way you outlined above and I got this error message "Uncaught exception 'Exception' with message 'DateTime::__construct() [<a href='datetime.--construct'>datetime.--construct</a>]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are required to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/New_York' for 'EDT/-4.0/DST'"

mario Over a year ago

Interesting. Then construct it like new DateTime("now", new DateTimeZone("America/New_York")); - It should be possible to override this later, and changing the timestamp alike. Or really try the procedural version and preface everything with date_default_timezone_set("America/New_York");

ackerchez Over a year ago

would I be able to feed in a unix timestamp in place of "now" ?

mario Over a year ago

No, only as second step. The init parameter must be a formatted time string.

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