Set time zone for strtotime function

Question

I'm setting a daily countdown to a deadline date. The code works fine.

The only issue is that, according to the PHP Manual, the function will use the default time zone:

Each parameter of this function uses the default time zone unless a time zone is specified in that parameter.

I need to be able to specify the time zone.

The sections I've read in the manual are not entirely clear how to do this.

Here's my code:

<?php
 $date = strtotime("September 30, 2016 11:59 PM");
 $remaining = $date - time(); // number of seconds remaining
 $days_remaining = floor($remaining / 86400);
 $hours_remaining = floor(($remaining % 86400) / 3600); // display final 5 days only
 echo "$days_remaining Days Remaining";
 ?>

Is there a simple way to integrate the US Pacific Time Zone to the code above?

My guess is to make this the first line of code:

date_default_timezone_set('America/Los_Angeles');

But I'm not sure this will work and I don't want to change the time zone for other scripts.

I'm open to alternative methods for achieving this goal.

Answer 1

You can capture the existing default timezone using date_default_timezone_get()

So save the current timezone, set the new one, and then do you calc's and then replace the original timezone like this

$save_zone = date_default_timezone_get();

date_default_timezone_set('America/Los_Angeles');

$date = strtotime("September 30, 2016 11:59 PM");
$remaining = $date - time(); // number of seconds remaining
$days_remaining = floor($remaining / 86400);
$hours_remaining = floor(($remaining % 86400) / 3600); // display final 5 days only
echo "$days_remaining Days Remaining";

date_default_timezone_set($save_zone);

list of valid timezone settings

Answer 2

Why not appending the time zone to the string?

$inputDate = "September 30, 2016 11:59 PM";
$date = strtotime($inputDate . ' +0100');