Is PHP DateTime object bugged? - php

I want to increment Timestamp to generate dates (timestamps being assumed with time=0 hour, 0 minute, 0 second). All worked fine along my loop unless the day of 2016-10-30: Example follows:
$date1=new DateTime;
$date1->setDate(2016,10,30);
$date1->setTime(0,0,0);
$date1_str=$date1->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');
$timestamp1=$date1->getTimestamp();
$timestamp2=$timestamp1+(60*60*24);// create the next day...
$date2=new DateTime;
$date2->setTimestamp($timestamp2);
$date2_str=$date2->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');
echo "date1_str=$date1_str; date2_str=$date2_str<br>";
The result I get is the following:
date1_str=2016-10-30 00:00:00; date2_str=2016-10-30 23:00:00
The 24 hours increment of timestamp is seen as a 23 hours increment!!
The remaing of the loop keep locked to time 23:00:00 instead of 00:00:00

When you play with time, and especially with dates you have to have in mind DST (Daylight Saving Time) for the date you referred 30/10/2016 the time changes for some countries in the world, so you have to take it into consideration when you apply your time local settings.

I think that you should use date_default_timezone_set in the top of your instructions. you can see more information in : http://php.net/manual/en/datetime.settimestamp.php.
keep in your mind that you will get varying results dependent on your current timezone. for example when you use date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York'); you will get : date1_str=2016-10-30 00:00:00; date2_str=2016-10-31 00:00:00
i hop this can help you

Related

How to Substract time from datetime

I am using a timezone based script where there is deadline based on timezones. Say for example a deadline is on 7th July at 6PM for a person in IST timezone. The deadline should be 1:30 less than 6pm in Dubai as per their timezone.
I have already calculated the difference between the two timezone difference. I am stuck at deducting that calculated time from the deadline time.
I have saved the timezones in +5:40 +4:00 -4:00 this format instead of using php default ones.
Here's what I use to add and subtract time from a date.
First of all, I get the date from the database and then convert it to a DateTime object.
$date = new DateTime($date);
I use add and a DateInterval to add time. Here's an example to add hours.
$date->add(new DateInterval("PT{$hoursToAdd}H"));
And here's and example to subtract hours intead:
$date->sub(new DateInterval("PT{$hoursToSubstract}H"));
Check this out to know how to work with DateInterval and add/subtract different times: http://php.net/manual/en/class.dateinterval.php
Can you explain a little more specifically what you want to do?
You want to subtract when data already on some var inside your script or you want the SQL query needed ?
If so maybe you can use this answer ---> How to subtract 3 hours from a datetime in MySQL?
The last answer of this post maybe is the one that fit the most what you need :
Assuming you have some timezone issue and know source and destination timezone, you could convert it like so
SELECT
DATE_FORMAT(CONVERT_TZ(x.date_entered, 'UTC', 'Europe/Berlin'), '%Y-%m-%d') AS date
FROM
x
ORDER BY
date ASC;

How to calculate average time of day taking into account timezone differences?

I'm using Laravel/PHP/MySQL and storing all dates and times in UTC.
The user can select a timezone (for example Eastern), enter a date and time, and the date and time will be converted to UTC before storing. On retrieval it will be converted to user's selected timezone.
My question is how can you get the average time of day from a series of records taking into account the timezone (preferably in the database query)? The following question addresses average time of day in PHP, but not the timezone issue.
How to calculate average time
Here is what I'm doing:
SEC_TO_TIME( AVG( TIME_TO_SEC( TIME(flights.departed_at) ) ) ) ) AS average_time
This works except for records that span daylight saving/standard time in a region that observes it.
FOR EXAMPLE: You may have a record with the UTC datetime of 2015-08-18 11:00:00 that was entered by a user in EDT at 2015-08-18 07:00:00. Then you have a second record entered with the UTC datetime of 2015-11-10 12:00:00 by a user in EST at 2015-11-10 07:00:00. If you try to calculate the average time of day it should equate to 07:00:00 but instead the result is 07:30:00.
Any ideas how to overcome this? Am I approaching this all wrong?
Thanks in advance.
In short, your code is working correctly. Once the date is in UTC, you'd have to re-calculate whether or not it was entered (1) during daylight savings time, (2) by someone actually observing daylight savings time, and (3) in a place that recognizes daylight savings time.
I can really only think of one way to approach this.
Add some kind of flag when the data is saved to mark the timestamp as DST. You can use this flag to adjust for the hour difference. How you generate this flag is up to you.
If you have all your times stored in Z, and if your MySQL database has the timezones loaded correctly, you can use the zoneinfo timezone name to retrieve your local times. For example,
SELECT CONVERT_TZ('2015-08-01 11:00', 'UTC', 'America/New_York'),
CONVERT_TZ('2015-12-01 12:00', 'UTC', 'America/New_York')
yields
2015-08-01 07:00 2015-12-01 07:00
The point is, the zoneinfo database knows to use daylight saving time or standard time for each datetime value. It doesn't use the current offset, it uses the offset in effect on the date in question.
So, you can retrieve the time of day, in local time, with an expression like this:
TIME(CONVERT_TZ(utc_time_column, 'UTC', 'America/New_York'))
Then, you average those times-of-day in the usual way.

What are the pitfalls in the approach to calculate time diff

I wish to calculate the difference b/w 2 times in min:sec format . so is my approch correct
date("i:s",(strtotime($User['end_time']) - strtotime($User['start_time'])));
You may get the problems with timezones on some servers.
A bettter way would be using UTC timezone for calculation:
$date = new DateTime('', new DateTimeZone('UTC'));
$date->setTimestamp(strtotime($User['end_time']) - strtotime($User['start_time']));
echo $date->format('i:s');
Another thing, if they are different in exactly 1 hour, the result will be 00:00
strtotime($User['end_time']) - strtotime($User['start_time']) gives you the difference in seconds. Then you pass it to date, so you get the minute and second of the date whose unix timestamp is that.

Mysql Current Timestamp and time() showing different values

OK. So I have been trying to implement a timer. Now a very weird thing is happening and I can't understand why ?.
Basically I am trying to find the difference between the last access and the current time. I am storing the time of last access in the database. This value is according to the server time. But when I try the time() function of php it shows me values which are 5-6 hours behind the time that I have in the database.
For example: here is my code :
$t1= strtotime($played_row->timer); // Time from the database with CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
$t2= strtotime("now"); // Get the current time
It shows Year: 2012 Month: 01 Day: 21 - 05:28 pm for t2
and Year: 2012 Month: 01 Day: 21 - 10:28 pm for my timestamp values.
Can anyone tell my why is that ?
P.S: I am running the code on my computer itself.
At a guess I would say that your database and PHP are using two different timezone offsets.
Most likely this is a timezone issue: if you are in the Eastern timezone, you are 5 hours away from UTC right now. If one sytem is returning local time and another is returning UTC this is what you will see.
Try using date_default_timezone_set() to set the timezone in PHP that is used in your database.
date_default_timezone_set — Sets the default timezone used by all
date/time functions in a script
Alse see date_default_timezone_get() how to get ini-set timezone.

Time difference between a Date and current Time?

Assume I have a funny video site that shows funny videos to users. Below every video, I want to have a statement that says "5 seconds ago", "31 minutes ago", "Yesterday", "2 days ago" based on a timestamp of the video and the current time.
The timestamp that I have is in the format: 2011-10-17 07:08:00.
I'm not too good with dates, but I'm guessing that I need to find the difference between the 2 date/time in seconds, then decide if its between 0sec & 60sec to display in seconds, or between 60sec & 3600sec to display in minutes, or between 3600sec & 3600x24sec to display in hours, between 3600x24sec & 3600x24x2sec to display yesterday, and so on... I believe I should be using strtotime() but I cant seem to find the current time as those solutions I found used new date() which does not seem to work!
How can I do this?
Btw, side question, when I insert 2011-10-17, 7:08PM EDT into a MySQL timestamp column, it gets converted to 2011-10-17 07:08:00 which is AM. How can I get it to be stored in the correct AM/PM?
You can use the DateTime functions of php.
$datetime1 = new DateTime('2011-10-17 07:08:00');
$datetime2 = new DateTime();
$interval = $datetime1->diff($datetime2);
echo $interval->format('%R%a days');
From here on you can use some if-statements to output the time difference in another format (seconds, minutes, hours, month, etc.) depending on the actual time difference! The formats for the output are to find here
You can very easily use the DATEDIFF and TIMEDIFF functions of MySQL. Both together tell you exactly how much time has passed.

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