UTC Date/Time String to Timezone

Question

How do I convert a date/time string (e.g. 2011-01-01 15:00:00) that is UTC to any given timezone php supports, such as America/New_York, or Europe/San_Marino.

Answer 1

Assuming the UTC is not included in the string then:

date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');
$datestring = '2011-01-01 15:00:00';  //Pulled in from somewhere
$date = date('Y-m-d H:i:s T',strtotime($datestring . ' UTC'));
echo $date;  //Should get '2011-01-01 10:00:00 EST' or something like that

Or you could use the DateTime object.

Answer 2

General purpose normalisation function to format any timestamp from any timezone to other. Very useful for storing datetimestamps of users from different timezones in a relational database. For database comparisons store timestamp as UTC and use with gmdate('Y-m-d H:i:s')

/**
 * Convert Datetime from any given olsonzone to other.
 * @return datetime in user specified format
 */

function datetimeconv($datetime, $from, $to)
{
    try {
        if ($from['localeFormat'] != 'Y-m-d H:i:s') {
            $datetime = DateTime::createFromFormat($from['localeFormat'], $datetime)->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');
        }
        $datetime = new DateTime($datetime, new DateTimeZone($from['olsonZone']));
        $datetime->setTimeZone(new DateTimeZone($to['olsonZone']));
        return $datetime->format($to['localeFormat']);
    } catch (\Exception $e) {
        return null;
    }
}

Usage:

$from = ['localeFormat' => "d/m/Y H:i A", 'olsonZone' => 'Asia/Calcutta'];

$to = ['localeFormat' => "Y-m-d H:i:s", 'olsonZone' => 'UTC'];

datetimeconv("14/05/1986 10:45 PM", $from, $to); // returns "1986-05-14 17:15:00"

Answer 3

How about:

$timezone = new DateTimeZone('UTC');
$date = new DateTime('2011-04-21 13:14', $timezone);
echo $date->format;

Answer 4

PHP's DateTime object is pretty flexible.

$UTC = new DateTimeZone("UTC");
$newTZ = new DateTimeZone("America/New_York");
$date = new DateTime( "2011-01-01 15:00:00", $UTC );
$date->setTimezone( $newTZ );
echo $date->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');

Answer 5

PHP's DateTime object is pretty flexible.

Since the user asked for more than one timezone option, then you can make it generic.

Generic Function

function convertDateFromTimezone($date,$timezone,$timezone_to,$format){
 $date = new DateTime($date,new DateTimeZone($timezone));
 $date->setTimezone( new DateTimeZone($timezone_to) );
 return $date->format($format);
}

Usage:

echo  convertDateFromTimezone('2011-04-21 13:14','UTC','America/New_York','Y-m-d H:i:s');

Output:

2011-04-21 09:14:00

Answer 6

function _settimezone($time,$defaultzone,$newzone)
{
$date = new DateTime($time, new DateTimeZone($defaultzone));
$date->setTimezone(new DateTimeZone($newzone));
$result=$date->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');
return $result;
}

$defaultzone="UTC";
$newzone="America/New_York";
$time="2011-01-01 15:00:00";
$newtime=_settimezone($time,$defaultzone,$newzone);