DateTime in PHP

[Randy Shaffer]

I am just learning PHP. I have a simple program to display the time. Why is the server time 6 hours ahead of central time? I thought all the serves were in Delaware?

http://www.nevb.us/SQL-PHP/dateSelect-vb.php

$today = time(); //stores today's date
$f_today = date("M-d-Y",$today); //formats today's date
$f_time = date("h-i-s-a",$today); //formats today's time

Thanks,
Randy

[Randy Shaffer]

I would bet it always returns Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

[Saf M]

I would bet it always returns Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

Our servers are located at three different locations.

1. Dallas
2. Atlanta
3. New Jersey

We also have lots of clients from other parts of the world. Therefore to keep things simple and organized we have set the time to GMT by default on all servers.

You can always display your local time on your website as this should not have direct relationship with it unless your script is programmed to fetch this data from the server clock.

[PsyCHZZZ]

Hi Randy,

As you would already know, the time() function retrieves the current time from the server. Now since you know that the server time is always x hours ahead; one easy way is to just add to the time() function like this:

//Assuming that time is 6 hours ahead from the server time
$today = time()+(6*60*60); //stores today's date and add additional 6 hours
$f_today = date("M-d-Y",$today); //formats today's date
$f_time = date("h-i-s-a",$today); //formats today's time

** NOTE: This will always display "your" local time so different visitors from different parts of the world would not have the time sync with theirs. If you need to display the visitors local time always; you'll need to use Javascript and fetch the data from the client's machine and not from the server.

Hope this helps. Cheers~

[Randy Shaffer]

Thanks Saf M and PsyCHZZZ. I add the 6 hours in the formula, but then thought that day light savings time would change it to 5 hours and I would have to change the code. I found this code - putenv("TZ=US/Eastern"); and inserted it after $today = time(); It seems to work. We will see when we spring forward.