php.net |  support |  documentation |  report a bug |  advanced search |  search howto |  statistics |  random bug |  login

go to bug id or search bugs for

Request #22652 Please add functions to convert between timezones
Submitted: 2003-03-11 23:02 UTC Modified: 2005-09-03 13:06 UTC
Votes:5
Avg. Score:4.2 ± 0.7
Reproduced:4 of 4 (100.0%)
Same Version:3 (75.0%)
Same OS:2 (50.0%)
From: photon at comcast dot net Assigned:
Status: Closed Package: Feature/Change Request
PHP Version: 4.3.1 OS: Linux
Private report: No CVE-ID: None
View Developer Edit
Welcome back! If you're the original bug submitter, here's where you can edit the bug or add additional notes.
If you forgot your password, you can retrieve your password here.
Password:
Status:
Package:
Bug Type:
Summary:
From: photon at comcast dot net
New email:
PHP Version: OS:

 

 [2003-03-11 23:02 UTC] photon at comcast dot net 
Hi,

PHP seems to have some innate knowledge of time zones, but I find it very lacking for this very simple thing.  Say I have a server in California, but I live in NJ.  An m-time, say, of a file on the server is displayed on my website, but it's in Pacific Time.  I want it in Eastern Time.  

It's not as simple as just adding 3 hours either, as Daylight Savings Time must be taken into effect.  Not just one DST crossover either, as the crossovers will be at different times.

To these ends, I propose three new date functions for PHP: a generalized converttime(int timestamp, string timezone1, string timezone2) which could be used easily to convert a time between two known DAYLIGHT-AWARE time zones, like so:

echo converttime(time(), PT, ET)

It would take the timestamp, see if it was daylight-time in PT, calculate the offset, check same for ET, convert.

Also convertfromlocal which could do this (known ET timestamp, want to convert to local time):

echo convertfromlocal(time(), ET)

and convertolocal (say I knew I had a PT timestamp and I wanted it in ET (with the machine running on PST))

echo converttolocal(time(), PT)

Thank you :)

Patches

Pull Requests

History

AllCommentsChangesGit/SVN commitsRelated reports
 [2004-06-14 14:29 UTC] daniel at NO dot brightbyte dot SPAM dot de 
The lack of timezone-conversion function is really a major problem. Please supply that functionality, there are plenty of libs out there to build on.

With to regards to what the original author suggested: functions like converttime() are a BAD idead, as they suggest converting the time-stamp -- which is, by definition, always in UTC. Instead, it would be much better to give the date() function an optional third parameter: the time zone. This would be consistent with the way this is handeled in other languages, like Perl. For a start, it would even be sufficient to only allow simple offsets of the form +0500 there -- but it would indeed be extremely helpful to allow DST-Aware zones (like Olson-DB zones).

I currently have this problem with a server in germany, that needs to display Vancouver time. As i don't want to do all the DST-conversion by hand, i'm stuck with using an external tool (written in perl) to convert from a unix-timestamp to a Vancouver date. This works well, but it's extremely slow. Also, it requires installation of a bunch of Perl-Modules on the server....

Oh, yea: this feature is still lacking under 4.3.4, and i see no mention in the documentation of supplying something like that in PHP 5... please, do!

thanks.
 [2004-06-14 14:34 UTC] derick@php.net 
This is in the works for PHP 5.1, please be patient for a while.
 [2005-09-03 13:06 UTC] derick@php.net 
This kind of functionality will be avaiable in PHP 5.1.1 and PHP 6.
 
PHP Copyright © 2001-2025 The PHP Group
All rights reserved. 		Last updated: Wed Jul 16 19:01:32 2025 UTC