Convert UTC dates to local time in PHP

Question

I\'m storing the UTC dates into the DB using:

$utc = gmdate(\"M d Y h:i:s A\");

and then I want to convert the saved UTC date to the client

Answer 1

First, get the date in UTC -- you've already done that so this step would really just be a database call:

$timezone = "UTC";
date_default_timezone_set($timezone);

$utc = gmdate("M d Y h:i:s A");
print "UTC: " . date('r', strtotime($utc)) . "\n";

Next, set your local time zone in PHP:

$timezone = "America/Guayaquil";
date_default_timezone_set($timezone);

And now get the offset in seconds:

$offset = date('Z', strtotime($utc));
print "offset: $offset \n";

Finally, add the offset to the integer timestamp of your original datetime:

print "LOCAL: " . date('r', strtotime($utc) + $offset) . "\n";