CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpdatetime
astroanu
astroanu

Reputation: 3971

Shifting unix time stamp according to timezone

I know this question has been answered many many times. I came in to a solution to solve this and its goes like this. I store all time stamps for each post in UTC on the server. Now i need to display the time stamp for a given timezone. I do this:

$tz : requested timezone $ts : timstamp on db $newts : new timestamp

$datetime = date('m/d/Y g:i a', $ts);
$dt = new DateTime($datetime, new DateTimeZone('UTC'));
date_default_timezone_set(trim($tz));
$newts = $dt->format('U');      
date_default_timezone_set('UTC');

However the resulting time stamp is 60~ seconds higher than what is should be. What am i doing wrong?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 250

Answers (2)

smithbh
smithbh

Reputation: 347

You're close, all you need to do is create the original DateTime object based on the timestamp/server timezone then set the new timezone and print the result, like so:

$datetime = new DateTime('@'.$ts, new DateTimeZone('UTC'));
$datetime->setTimezone(new DateTimeZone($tz));

print $datetime->format('m/d/Y g:i a');

The unix timestamp will be the same regardless of the timezone (it is TZ agnostic). The offset occurs when displaying it for different time zones. This is you can test this by printing the unix timestamp for each different timezone (they will be the same).

Upvotes: 2

Oswald
Oswald

Reputation: 31657

The U format gives you the number of "seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT)". That number does not depend on where on earth you are. So even if it might be 14:59 at your place while it's 10:24 at my place, the number of seconds since January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT is the same at both our places. A "time stamp for a given timezone" does not make sense.

Upvotes: 0

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