Ibuildings techPortal: Tips for PHP Date and Time Functions
In this new post from the Ibuildings techPortal today Michael shares some handy tips for working the date and time functions in PHP (all can be used in a non-PHP 5.3 installation).
His tips for these very handy functions include:
- A Unix timestamp is never timezone-specific; if you call time() at the same moment on computers in different time zones, you get exactly the same value back.
- The time string is interpreted as a local time; there is no gm- equivalent [of strptime], or even any way to simulate one, since it ignores the value of date_default_timezone_set. Note that you can impose a timezone on the input string if it contains a timezone abbreviation or offset.
- [With date/gmdate] as with strftime/gmstrftime, the gm- prefix affects whether the result is a representation of the time in the current timezone or in the UTC timezone.
- How does PHP know what your current timezone is? It tries a few different places, including the TZ environment variable and the date.timezone ini option.