I have dates in my database in local British times (i.e. GMT in the winter and BST in the summer). I want to convert them to DATE_ICAL for displaying into iCalendar format. I have tried both the following.
date(DATE_ICAL, strtotime($row['FixtureDate']);
date(DATE_ICAL, strtotime($row['FixtureDate'].' UTC');
My first date for example is 12:45 BST. If I use the first statement I get 20140809T124500Z and the second I get 20140809T134500Z. Neither shows the right date in Google.
The second is obviously wrong because my time is not a UTC time, I think I need to convert my time to a UTC time as that's what DATE_ICAL wants? But how do I do that?
My server is British. I only care about British times and British users.
Finally figured it out, I needed to use GMDATE not DATE with ICAL format
define('DATE_ICAL', 'Ymd\THis\Z');
GMDATE(DATE_ICAL, strtotime($row['FixtureDate']));
Related
Anyone can explain to me in which format are these DateTime strings from OpenWeatherMap API and how to work with them in order to:
Just see the time (Greenwich +1)
sun rise="2019-01-28T06:31:03" set="2019-01-28T16:14:39"
View the Date & Time (Greenwich +1)
lastupdate value="2019-01-28T11:20:00"
Those dates are in ISO 8601
The examples you actually have do NOT contain any TimeZone information so they could be any timezone..
If you work with datetime offsets (that include time zone information) you would typically see something like this
2008-09-15T15:53:00+05:00
The reasone it is formatted in ISO 8601 is so that the date time picker (that is the actual format you use for the value) on your HTML page knows how to interpret the time into your local (machine clock configured time)
Typically if using UTC you will have a date time that looks like
2008-09-15T15:53:00Z
Which is Zulu Time
And as i mentioned already if it does not have any of those it is assumed local time at server that generated it.
Thanks, I was able to convert them by using concatenated date and strtotime functions.
date('H.i',strtotime($sunset_time));
The local time on the server is Greenwich, whereas I would need to add +1 for my time zone (Europe/Rome).
In the end I was able to add +1 hour like this:
date('H.i', strtotime($sunset_time) + 60*60);
Is this a correct way?
My question is more on the concept side.
I'm wondering how to deal with dates only based information. For example, when you have a day to take a vacation or something like that on February 24th and you store on the database as 2015-02-24 00:00:00 right.... how do I deal with conversions in this case?
I already now how to convert timezones, it works with no problem in cases where the user selects a time too. But when I use 00:00:00 in cases only the date matters I'm having problems to figure it out.
For example:
Let's say I setup my vacation to be on the 24th of February and I'm on EST right, and the system is saving all times on EST. It will convert and it will be saved as 2015-02-24 00:00:00
Then somebody on PST time will check it out, and when it convert to them it will be 2015-02-23 21:00:00 ... and it will show my vacation in their point of you it will be on the 23rd.
Is that a correct logic? How should I save on the database the time in that case? Keep it as 00:00:00?
I hope I was able to explain myself.
Thanks
You can save the date in unix timestamp in the database (always save the current time in GMT even if you are in EST).
And when displaying the date, convert it to the user's timezone.
I am using strtotime() to get a timestamp from a date and time string. I will be running strtotime() during the summer (daylight savings) to give me a timestamp of a winter date (non-daylight savings).
In the winter, I will need to convert my timestamp to a readable date using date() -- will it be the same date/time I put into strtotime() during the summer?
On each one of my pages, I am setting my timezone by date_default_timezone_set with my city.
So, running this during the summer (daylight savings):
date_default_timezone_set('America/Los_Angeles');
echo strtotime("Dec 1 2014 8:00 am");
Gives me a certain timestamp 1417449600.
Will running this during the winter (non-daylight savings) return 8:00am as I need it to do?
date_default_timezone_set('America/Los_Angeles');
echo date("g:ia",1417449600);
Yes. If the timezone you set is doesn't explicitly say whether it's standard or daylight-savings time, it automatically determines the state of DST from the time that you give it and the rules for when the timezone switches into and out of DST.
Yes. A UNIX timestamp such as 1417449600 represents a completely, globally, universally unique point in time, independent of fussy timezone notation. There's only one "December 1st 2014 8 am in Los Angeles", which is the same point in time as "December 1st 2014 17:00 CET" and a number of other local notations across the world. The UNIX timestamp 1417449600 expresses that point in time, regardless of whatever your wall clock says exactly.
When you format this unique point in time back to a more human readable format using date(), it figures out what exactly the time must be formatted at based on the set timezone. It won't change based on what the time or DST settings are now.
Hi i am working on facebook Graph API where i need all the posts information of a group. So I did it and saw [created_date'] => '2013-01-25T00:11:02+0000' what does this date and time represent i mean i know 2013-01-25 is date and 00:11:02 is time but what does T and +0000 represent.
BTW where is the server of facebook. Which timestamp should i use to match facebook time?
Thank you.
T = TIME and the +0000 is timezone offset. Facebook uses localized timezones. You can request a Unix timestamp instead of the string by adding the parameter: date_format=U to your graph API call.
Please see this link for more information.
The date format is called ISO 8601. The letter T is used to separate date and time unambiguously and +0000 is used to signify the timezone offset, in this case GMT or UTC.
That said, you generally don't need to worry so much about the actual contents; rather you should know how to work with them. To use such a date, you can use strtotime() to convert it into a time-stamp:
$ts = strtotime('2013-01-25T00:11:02+0000');
To convert the time-stamp back into a string representation, you can simply use gmdate() with the predefined date constant DATE_ISO8601:
echo gmdate(DATE_ISO8601, $ts);
Alternatively, using DateTime:
// import date
$d = DateTime::createFromFormat(DateTime::ISO8601, '2013-01-25T00:11:02+0000');
// export date
echo $dd->format(DateTime::ISO8601), PHP_EOL;
This is a standard format, specifically ISO 8601.
As much as I don't like linking to it, http://www.w3schools.com/schema/schema_dtypes_date.asp does have a good "human-understandable" explanation:
The dateTime is specified in the following form "YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss"
where:
YYYY indicates the year
MM indicates the month
DD indicates the day
T indicates the start of the required time section
hh indicates the hour
mm indicates the minute
ss indicates the second
To specify a time zone, you can either enter a dateTime in UTC time by
adding a "Z" behind the time - like this:
2002-05-30T09:30:10Z
or you can specify an offset from the UTC time by adding a positive or
negative time behind the time - like this:
2002-05-30T09:30:10-06:00
or
2002-05-30T09:30:10+06:00
Therefore, in your case the +0000 indicates a time offset of 0 from UTC.
I need to format a UNIX timestamp in GMT format to a local date/time. I'm using gmstrftime to do this and I can get the correct result if I use an offset. I just so happen to know what my offset is for the pacific timezone but I don't want to have to get the correct time like this. I've used date_default_timezone_set so gmstrftime is reporting the correct timezone but the time is off by like a day.
I don't get it. If gmstrftime knows what timezone I'm in, why is the time off?
If you have the correct timezone set (such as with date_default_timezone_set) then you only need to use date() for the formatting, no extra coding. UNIX timestamps are in GMT by definition of a UNIX timestamp -- number of seconds since January 1, 1970 00:00:00 GMT.
gmstrftime will always return the time as UTC, seems like you want strftime.