CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phptimetimezone
Hassan
Hassan

Reputation: 2843

PHP : getting Timezone offset from user side and calculate "time ago"

I am trying to calculate time passed since a comment is posted. I found a function for this and it's working well

But I just noticed the time shown to user is wrong because of his/her timezone. I did some research and the solution seems to be passing the user's timezone offset to the php page using a javascript function called getTimezoneOffset.

the problem is that I can't manage to use this Offset to make a timezone and use it on that function I linked above. With the help of another code is what I could gather so far :

function humanTiming ($time,$offset)
{

    $isDST = 1; // Daylight Saving 1 - on, 0 - off
    $timezoneName = timezone_name_from_abbr('', intval($offset, 10) * 36, $isDST);

    $date = new DateTime($time, new DateTimeZone($timezoneName));
    $time = strtotime($date);

    $time = time() - $time; // to get the time since that moment

    $tokens = array (
        31536000 => 'year',
        2592000 => 'month',
        604800 => 'week',
        86400 => 'day',
        3600 => 'hour',
        60 => 'minute',
        1 => 'second'
    );

    foreach ($tokens as $unit => $text) {
        if ($time < $unit) continue;
        $numberOfUnits = floor($time / $unit);
        return $numberOfUnits.' '.$text.(($numberOfUnits>1)?'s':'');
    }

}

And let's call the function like this :

echo humanTiming ($row['date'],"-240");

note : -240 is the value I get from running that javascript function, So it is probably my timezone offset.

First issue: It seems the value -240is invalid and something like -0500 works.

Second issue: even If I try with the valid offset value, the function returns 42 years

Not sure how this 42 years is calculated but its totally wrong.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2355

Answers (2)

Maciek
Maciek

Reputation: 1972

You could offset everything like so:

$today=new DateTime("-$offset minutes");
$tomorrow=new DateTime("+1 day-$offset minutes");

Upvotes: 0

John C
John C

Reputation: 8415

A couple of problems: The Javascript function getTimezoneOffset() returns the timezone offset in minutes, however timezone_name_from_abbr() expects the offset in seconds. So in your example of -240 that is actually -4 hours or -14396 seconds. You can fix your code by changing the math a little:

$timezoneName = timezone_name_from_abbr('', intval($offset) * 60, $isDST);

Since you've started using the DateTime object, you can't then use strtotime to get the Unix timestamp. Instead you need format():

$date = new DateTime($time, new DateTimeZone($timezoneName));
$time = $date->format('U');

This should get the result you are after. You were getting 42 years because the time was set to 0 (strtotime($date) evaluated to false) which is Unix epoch - 1970.

Upvotes: 4

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