Our server is set to GMT time so the hour does not keep jumping around in spring and autumn. However, during summer time, it is annoying that all the times are displayed an hour out.
How do I get and display the time, taking into account the local timezone in PHP (especially when the server thinks the local timezone is GMT).
or, How do I know if an area is using "summer time" at the moment?
or, How do I display a GMT time stamp or a different timezone?
Actually, I think I may have found the answer I need...
date_default_timezone_set()
// Sets the default timezone used by all date/time functions in a script
The PHP manual entry is here:- http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.date-default-timezone-set.php
You could add this line in PHP:
putenv("TZ=US/Eastern");
And every subsequent call to time()/date() will give you the time in your time zone.
List of time zones
This code will display the current time in the Eastern time zone (US):
putenv("TZ=US/Eastern");
date("h:i:s")
You can use the date function to offset GMT
Easiest way to display local time is to use JavaScript:
<?php
// Get unix time from database
$seconds = .....;
?>
<html>
<head>
<script type="text/javascript">
function showLocalTime()
{
var seconds = <?=$seconds;?>;
var date = new Date(seconds*1000);
var hours = date.getHours();
var minutes = "0" + date.getMinutes();
var seconds = "0" + date.getSeconds();
var formattedTime = hours + ':' + minutes.substr(minutes.length-2) + ':' + seconds.substr(seconds.length-2);
document.getElementById("local_time").innerHTML = "Local Time: " + formattedTime;
}
</script>
</head>
<body onload="showLocalTime()">
<h2 id="local_time"> Local Time: </h2>
</body>
</html>
get the date/time and first check to see if the month (split on dashes if its a DATETIME field) is a 'summer month', or a month that will cause the time to be an hour out.
If so, convert it to a unix timestamp. Then, add (or minus, whichever way it is out) 60 * 60 (60 mins) to the timestamp and convert into a human readable format.
Problem solved!
Related
My problem is as follows:
I want to display nepalese standard time in my website,so i set default timezone of my
website to 'Asia/kathmandu' using command: php_value date.timezone 'Asia/kathmandu' in htaccess file.
when i display time using any php functions like strftime() or date() ,it shows the nepalese standard time,
But when i use javascript function new Date(<?php echo time()*1000; ?>),it displays
the time of my personal pc i am using to view my website.
How can i display correct time using javascript date functions? Can anybody help me out?
Your issue is because javascript (actually ECMAScript) date objects are based on a UTC time value. When you do:
new Date(<?php echo time()*1000; ?>)
you are passing a UTC millisecond time value to the Date constructor, which then creates a date object. When you use the usual Date methods to format a string, or use Date.prototpye.toString or Date.prototype.toLocaleString, you will get a string based on the client's locale. Note that all these strings are implementation dependent and vary widely for the locale version.
If you want the timezone of the server, then use the server to set it. Or you can send a time zone offset in minutes to be applied to the local time to get back to Nepalese Standard Time (UTC + 5:45). Note that in ECMAScript, the time zone offset is minutes to be added to the local time to get UTC, whereas it is more normal to define the offset in minutes to be added to UTC to get the local time.
So to get NST:
function toNST(timeValue) {
function z(n) {return (n<10? '0' : '') + n}
var d = new Date();
var nstOffset = 5 * 60 + 45;
d.setMinutes(d.getMinutes() + d.getTimezoneOffset() + nstOffset);
return z(d.getHours()) + ':' + z(d.getMinutes()) + ':' + z(d.getSeconds());
}
alert(toNST(+(new Date()))); // about 11:07:17 at the moment
Use
new Date(Date.NPT(year, month, day, hour, minute, second))
Call the time via ajax from your server. That has the advantage of a better code maintanance. If you change the time again (e.g. if you want to use the code for another location) you have only to change the time in .haccess.
I have a php variable say $expTime (which has a unixtime say-1359683953) . I want to display this variable on the client side(in a proper time format according to his local time) . I am so confused between the UTC ,GMT , DST all that things. Can anyone suggest a solution for this using php or javascript please.
when I am using echo date('h:i M d/y',$expTime) it is showing me a wrong time.
How I am saving the time to database:
var exp_day= parseInt($("#exp_day").val());
var exp_hrs= parseInt($("#exp_hrs").val());
var exp_min= parseInt($("#exp_min").val());
var exp_time = (exp_day*24*60*60) + (exp_hrs*60*60) + (exp_min*60) ;
then I posted the exp_time using ajax to a php file -
$expTime = time() + $_POST["exp_time"];
What I am retrieving from the database is $expTime . This $expTime I want to display it on the all the clients system according to there local time zone (also by making sure the day light saving)
Use DateTime with timezones:
$datetime = new DateTime('#1359683953');
echo $datetime->format('h:i M d/y') . "<br>";
$datetime->setTimezone(new DateTimeZone('America/Los_Angeles'));
echo $datetime->format('h:i M d/y');
See it in action
UNIX time values are usually UTC seconds since epoch. Javascript time values are UTC milliseconds since the same epoch. The ECMA-262 Date.prototype.toString method automatically generates a string representing the local time and takes account of daylight saving if it applies.
You can also use Date methods to create your own formatted string, they also return local time and date values. There are also UTC methods if you want to work in UTC.
To do this on the client, just provide a UTC time value from the server and then all you need in javascript is:
var timeValue = 1359683953; // assume seconds
var date = new Date(timeValue * 1000); // convert time value to milliseconds
alert(date); // Fri 01 Feb 2013 11:59:13 GMT+1000
I've been searching alot and I can't seem to find a solution.
I have a PHP web page where I can schedule email alerts at specific times. I select the date and time of when the alert is to be sent. This is stored in MySQL table in UNIX format. I have a job that executes every 15 minutes and sends the emails if the date+time is in the past - this all works perfectly except I need to extend it for my USA colleagues. I am based in Ireland so I will need to manage the different timezones all across the US. I am planning on adding a select list of timezones that the user will have to select once they register...at least thats a start. Managing timezones is fine because I reckon all I need to do is minus the time different from the server time and then save the date time in unix format. DST is a different issue tho - does anyone have any ideas on how to overcome this?
I have read that using UTC as the base time but even if that is the case wont I still have the same issue?
Thanks a mil!
Your times are already in UNIX timestamp format so all you need is to calculate time difference (offset) of user. For example Ireland is in UTC/UTC+1 timezone. So all you need is to do the math like james_t mentioned in his comment. If you need user from Ireland to get an email in 9:00pm UTC+1 you have to send it in 8:00pm UTC. So what's an idea?
Allow users to select timezone which means they select offset from UTC. Keep it somewhere in database (your users table or some other table, doesn't matter).
Convert offset in seconds:
$delta_time = -1 * $offset * 3600
Then calculate your trigger-time:
$trigger_time = time() + $delta_time;
Now you have time when your email sender can fire in right moment depending on user's timezone settings.
For example:
$offset = 1; // summer in Ireland
$server_time = time(); // at the moment 1350509127
$delta_time = -1 * $offset * 3600; // -3600
$trigger_time = $server_time + $delta_time; // 1350505527
All you need is to compare $trigger_time with UNIX timestamp from your database and decide to send an email (or not).
Ofc, it's not bad idea to use PHP timezones instead of pure +/- offset and stay updated when DST changes apply on certain locations.
Make some test, this is not that hard.
This is just a general idea, not complete working solution.
Update:
To calculate time-difference in seconds between any two timezones you can use something like this:
function delta_offset()
function delta_offset($server_timezone, $user_timezone) {
$dt = new DateTime('now', new DateTimeZone($server_timezone));
$offset_server = $dt->getOffset();
$dt->setTimezone(new DateTimeZone($user_timezone));
$offset_user = $dt->getOffset();
return $offset_user - $offset_server;
}
To get an offset in seconds:
$server_tz = "Europe/London";
$user_tz = "America/New_York";
$offset = delta_offset($server_tz, $user_tz); // offset in sec.
Create some output:
$dt = new DateTime('now', new DateTimeZone('UTC'));
echo "<pre>UTC date/time: " . $dt->format('l, F jS, <b>H:i:s</b>') . "\n";
$dt = new DateTime('now', new DateTimeZone($server_tz));
echo "London date/time: " . $dt->format('l, F jS, <b>H:i:s</b>') . "\n";
$dt = new DateTime('now', new DateTimeZone($user_tz));
echo "New York date/time: " . $dt->format('l, F jS, <b>H:i:s</b>') . "\n\n";
echo "Time difference between London (UK) and New York (USA) is: <b>$offset_h</b> ($offset s)</pre>";
Output in browser (in moment of writing this post):
UTC date/time: Wednesday, October 17th, 22:32:27
London date/time: Wednesday, October 17th, 23:32:27
New York date/time: Wednesday, October 17th, 18:32:27
Time difference between London (UK) and New York (USA) is: -5:00 (-18000 s)
In this case offset is -5 hours (-18000 seconds) but it automatically changes if DST rules change for any of timezones given as function-arguments.
Delta-offset provides information how much earlier or later you have to send an email to user in different timezone and all you need now is to do simple +/- delta-offset with your email-sender's scheduler.
Hope this may help you to get right solution for your problem.
Update #2 - Example (theory)
Imagine this situation.
Your current server-time is X and its 7:00pm at the moment in Ireland. I live in Serbia and we have same DST rules but I’m one hour after (UTC+1/UTC+2). Difference between your and my time is +3600 seconds (1 hour).
Now you have to send an email to me in 10:00pm (it’s 9:00pm in Ireland).
Current time is X.
Delta-offset is -1 * +3600 = -3600 (delta-offset multiplied with -1).
Sending time on your location in 10:00 pm is X + 10800 (3 hours later).
Sending time on my location in 10 pm is X + 10800 + delta-offset = X + 7200 (2 hours later).
Formula to check if actual time is equal or greater than trigger-time (sending time) is:
current_timestamp >= trigger_timestamp + delta_offset
where delta-offset from delta_offset() function must be multiplied with -1 to use in formula.
Now you can send email when you want and be sure it will be sent using user's local time (ofc, if user timezone settings are correct).
Note: Difference from this example (Serbia - Ireland = +1 hour) is different during DST changes which means that 1 hour every year we're in same timezone (0 delta-offset), and one hour we have +2 hours delta-offset. This is possible because DST changes are applied 1 hour earlier in Serbia so when our time is changed +1 you have to wait 60 minutes before same change applies to Ireland-time *then we're +2) and same thing when we bring back clock to normal time (0 difference).
How can I add +9 hours on my script below ? I don't prefer to just add 9 hours to the correct time, for example if I want it 13:22:54 to make it 22:22:54 for this to work but on the script.
I create the unix timestamp in a php file doing
$end = mktime(16, 54, 0, 8, 18, 2011);
and the copy it below
Countdown Script
<script type="text/javascript">
var end_date = new Date(<?php echo $end; ?>*1000);
$(document).ready(function() {
$("#time").countdown({
date: end_date,
onComplete: function( event ){
$(this).html("completed");
},
leadingZero: true
});
});
</script>
<p id="time" class="time"></p>
Instead of playing the heroes by trying to do time Math (and even failing badly), you should rely on native methods, available to both PHP and JS:
// gets the time 9 hours from now
// you can give a 2nd parameter to specify when is "now"
$date = strtotime('+9 hours');
and:
// get the time right now
var date = new Date()
// add 9 hours, don't worry about jumping the 24hr boundary, JS resolves correctly.
date.setHours(date.getHours()+9)
Edit:
Since the OP said he wanted to use a TS from DB, here's the relevant code:
$date = strtotime('+9 hours', (int)$db_time);
Note: If $db_time is a formatted string, like "24 April 2011, 4:56 pm", you need to put the following code before the one above:
$db_time = strtotime($db_time);
However, I urge you to check for alternative ways to parse the time.
I'm going to read between the lines here a bit. I assume based on this and previous questions that you want a countdown for some event in the future and you're pulling a timestamp from a database and adding 9 hours to it to get the time of that future event.
Assuming this, you can't use most (any?) of the previous answers because of time zones and the fact that the user's clock might be more or less off. So if you calculate on the server that the event should fire at 5 o'clock and send that info to the user who's 3 time zones away from the server, the countdown will also be 3 hours off (because when it's 5 o'clock where the user is it's either 2 or 8 o'clock where the server is.)
The solution is to calculate the time left until the event and send that information to the browser. This way the countdown will be independent of the user's timezone or their computer's clock. For example if the event is at 5 o'clock and it's now 4 o'clock tell the browser to put 60*60*1=3600 seconds on the timer.
Using part of Christian's answer, do something like this on the server (assuming $db_time contains a Unix timestamp retrieved from the database):
$date = strtotime('+9 hours', (int)$db_time);
$timeUntilEvent = $date - time();
Now $timeUntilEvent contains the amount of seconds until the event. In JavaScript add that number to the timer:
var end_date = new Date();
end_date.setTime( end_date.getTime() + <?php echo $timeUntilEvent; ?> * 1000 );
Now the timer will fire at the correct time regardless of what time the user's clock is set to.
var end_date = new Date((<?php echo $end; ?>+32400)*1000);
end_date = end_date + ((3600*1000)*9);
mktime returns seconds, so you simply add the desired amount of seconds
using the end_date created with php, add this line:
end_date+=9*60*60
Call this before your countdown:
end_date = end_date.setTime((end_date + (9 * 3600)) * 1000).toGMTString();
EDIT: I removed the get_time() and the "* 1000" as end_date is already a UNIX timestamp.
EDIT2: Apparently, timestamps in js are in milliseconds so we also have to multiply the PHP timestamp (which is in seconds).
I'm writing a PHP system and I need to get the system time. Not the GMT time or the time specific to a timezone, but the same system time that is used by the CRON system. I have a CRON job that runs every day at midnight and I want to show on a webpage how long will it take before it runs again.
For example:
Right now it is 6pm on my system clock. I run the code:
$timeLeftUntilMidnight = date("H:i", strtotime("tomorrow") - strtotime("now"));
The result, however, is "3:00" instead of "6:00". If I run
date("H:i", strtotime("tomorrow"));
It returns 0:00, which is correct. But if I run
date("H:i", strtotime("now"));
It returns 21:00, even though the correct should be 18:00.
Thanks.
There are many answers, however there is not even one correct at the time of writing.
PHP time() function doesn't return the system time, like most folks believe, but it return the PHP localtime, normally set with date.timezone in php.ini, or set with date_default_timezone_set() within a script.
For instance in one of my servers, PHP time was set to Europe/Romeand system time to UTC. I had a difference of one hour between system time and PHP time.
I'm going to give you a solution that works for Linux, I don't know for Windows. In Linux the system timezone is set in /etc/timezone. Now, this is normally outside my allowed open_basedir setting, but you can add :/etc/timezone to your list to be able to read the file.
Then, on top of the scripts, that want to get the system time, you can call a library function that sets the script timezone to the system timezone. I suppose that this function is part of a class, so I use static:
static function setSystemTz() {
$systemTz = trim(file_get_contents("/etc/timezone"));
if ($systemTz == 'Etc/UTC') $systemTz = 'UTC';
date_default_timezone_set($systemTz);
}
To make the matter worse in PHP 5.3.3 'Etc/UTC' is not recognized, while 'UTC' is, so I had to add an if to fix that.
Now you can happily call time() and it will really give you the system time. I've tested it, because I needed it for myself, that's why I found this question now.
php's time will return the system time. you can format it with date
if you just want to display the time in the local time of the visitor maybe you're better off using a little javascript
This is the easiest and most foolproof way to do it:
$sys_timestamp = strtotime(exec("date"));
Let's not try to spoof it with php, let's just get the real sys time ;)
(Will work on any unix based system)
time()
will give you the current system timestamp.
Manual
Returns the current time measured in the number of seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT).
You can get the date/time of the server on which PHP is running using the time() function -- it'll return a timestamp, that corresponds to the current datetime.
It's the system time, on that server -- the same as used by cron.
If you want the GMT time you may want to use gmtstrftime(), which will give you the system time but as in GMT. There's more info at http://us2.php.net/gmstrftime.
If you are after a formatted date:
date ('d/m/y h:i:s');
will do the trick, there is no need to pass time() into date as it will default to the current system time if no second parameter is supplied.
for more formatting options see here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php
Otherwise you can just use
time()
To get you the current unix timestamp as others have mentioned.
For getting the current time of your system you need to set the correct date.timezone in your php.ini file. For example if you are from India then you would write:
date.timezone = Asia/Calcutta
For Germany, it would be:
date.timezone = Europe/Berlin
After doing this, date("Y-m-d H:i:s") will give your current time. For getting your timezone see the list of timezones supported by PHP.
try this one:
$time=date("h:i:s A", strtotime("now"-14));
echo $time;
You can adjust the time by changing the number 14 above.
You can current local time via below Javascript and set it in any PHP variable than.
<script>
// For 24 hours
var ct = new Date();
var hr = ct.getHours();
var mt = ct.getMinutes();
if (mt < 10) {
mt = "0" + mt;
}
document.write("<b>" + hr + ":" + mt + " " + "</b>");
// For 12 hours (AM / PM)
var ct = new Date();
var hr = ct.getHours();
var mt = ct.getMinutes();
var ampm = "AM";
if (hr >= 12) {
ampm = "PM";
hr = hr - 12;
}
if (hr == 0) {
hr = 12;
}
if (mt < 10) {
mt = "0" + mt;
}
document.write("<b>" + hr + ":" + mt + " " + ampm + "</b>");
</script>