PHP Cookbook

3.11. Calculating Time with Time Zones

Problem

You need to calculate times in different time zones. For example, you want to give users information adjusted to their local time, not the local time of your server.

Solution

For simple calculations, you can explicitly add or subtract the offsets between two time zones:

// If local time is EST
$time_parts = localtime();
// California (PST) is three hours earlier
$california_time_parts = localtime(time() - 3 * 3600);

On Unix-based systems, if you don’t know the offsets between time zones, just set the TZ environment variable to your target time zone:

putenv('TZ=PST8PDT');
$california_time_parts = localtime();

Discussion

Before we sink too deeply into the ins and outs of time zones, we want to pass along the disclaimer that the U.S. Naval Observatory offers at http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/tzones.html. Namely, official worldwide time-zone information is somewhat fragile “because nations are sovereign powers that can and do change their timekeeping systems as they see fit.” So, remembering that we are at the mercy of the vagaries of international relations, here are some ways to cope with Earth’s many time zones.

For a relatively simple treatment of offsets between time zones, use an array in your program that has the various time zones’ offsets from UTC. Once you determine what time zone your user is in, just add that offset to the appropriate UTC time and the functions that print out UTC time (e.g., gmdate( ), gmstrftime( )) can print ...