How to find day of week in php in a specific timezone - php

Question

I am confused while using php to handle date/time.
What I am trying to do is this: When a user visits my page I am asking his timezone and then displaying the 'day of week' in his timezone.
I don't want to use the browser's day.
I want to do this calculation in php.
This is how I am trying to achieve it:
The timezone entered by user
Unix time stamp calculated by php time() function.
But I dont know how to proceed...
How would i get the 'day of week' in this timezone.

Answer 1

$dw = date( "w", $timestamp);
Where $dw will be 0 (for Sunday) through 6 (for Saturday) as you can see here:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

Answer 2

My solution is this:
$tempDate = '2012-07-10';
echo date('l', strtotime( $tempDate));
Output is: Tuesday
$tempDate = '2012-07-10';
echo date('D', strtotime( $tempDate));
Output is: Tue

Answer 3

I think this is the correct answer, just change Europe/Stockholm to the users time-zone.
$dateTime = new \DateTime(
'now',
new \DateTimeZone('Europe/Stockholm')
);
$day = $dateTime->format('N');
ISO-8601 numeric representation of the day of the week (added in PHP 5.1.0)
1 (for Monday) through 7 (for Sunday)
http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php
For a list of supported time-zones, see
http://php.net/manual/en/timezones.php

Answer 4

Thanks a lot guys for your quick comments.
This is what i will be using now.
Posting the function here so that somebody may use it.
public function getDayOfWeek($pTimezone)
{
$userDateTimeZone = new DateTimeZone($pTimezone);
$UserDateTime = new DateTime("now", $userDateTimeZone);
$offsetSeconds = $UserDateTime->getOffset();
//echo $offsetSeconds;
return gmdate("l", time() + $offsetSeconds);
}
Report if you find any corrections.

Answer 5

Another quick way:
date_default_timezone_set($userTimezone);
echo date("l");

Answer 6

If you can get their timezone offset, you can just add it to the current timestamp and then use the gmdate function to get their local time.
// let's say they're in the timezone GMT+10
$theirOffset = 10; // $_GET['offset'] perhaps?
$offsetSeconds = $theirOffset * 3600;
echo gmdate("l", time() + $offsetSeconds);

Answer 7

$myTimezone = date_default_timezone_get();
date_default_timezone_set($userTimezone);
$userDay = date('l', $userTimestamp);
date_default_timezone_set($myTimezone);
This should work (didn't test it, so YMMV). It works by storing the script's current timezone, changing it to the one specified by the user, getting the day of the week from the date() function at the specified timestamp, and then setting the script's timezone back to what it was to begin with.
You might have some adventures with timezone identifiers, though.

Answer 8

"Day of Week" is actually something you can get directly from the php date() function with the format "l" or "N" respectively. Have a look at
the manual
edit: Sorry I didn't read the posts of Kalium properly, he already explained that. My bad.

Answer 9

Check date is monday or sunday before get last monday or last sunday
public function getWeek($date){
$date_stamp = strtotime(date('Y-m-d', strtotime($date)));
//check date is sunday or monday
$stamp = date('l', $date_stamp);
$timestamp = strtotime($date);
//start week
if(date('D', $timestamp) == 'Mon'){
$week_start = $date;
}else{
$week_start = date('Y-m-d', strtotime('Last Monday', $date_stamp));
}
//end week
if($stamp == 'Sunday'){
$week_end = $date;
}else{
$week_end = date('Y-m-d', strtotime('Next Sunday', $date_stamp));
}
return array($week_start, $week_end);
}

Answer 10

Based on one of the other solutions with a flag to switch between weeks starting on Sunday or Monday
function getWeekForDate($date, $weekStartSunday = false){
$timestamp = strtotime($date);
// Week starts on Sunday
if($weekStartSunday){
$start = (date("D", $timestamp) == 'Sun') ? date('Y-m-d', $timestamp) : date('Y-m-d', strtotime('Last Sunday', $timestamp));
$end = (date("D", $timestamp) == 'Sat') ? date('Y-m-d', $timestamp) : date('Y-m-d', strtotime('Next Saturday', $timestamp));
} else { // Week starts on Monday
$start = (date("D", $timestamp) == 'Mon') ? date('Y-m-d', $timestamp) : date('Y-m-d', strtotime('Last Monday', $timestamp));
$end = (date("D", $timestamp) == 'Sun') ? date('Y-m-d', $timestamp) : date('Y-m-d', strtotime('Next Sunday', $timestamp));
}
return array('start' => $start, 'end' => $end);
}

Answer 11

echo date('l', strtotime('today'));