Posted by M. Sokolewicz on 01/18/05 17:27

Tom wrote:

> Marcus Bointon wrote:
>
>>
>> On 18 Jan 2005, at 10:53, Tom wrote:
>>
>>> PST = UTC - 8, therefore if you ask for strtotime in PST it will give
>>> you now + 8. This is standard in most languages, you are just
>>> reading the functionality back to front.
>>> ie when you say strtotome('now PST'), what you are asking for is the
>>> current local time (UTC in your instance) given an input date in PST
>>
>>
>>
>> OK, I see some logic in that - now how to work around it?
>>
>>> try
>>> print date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime('now') -0800)."\n";
>>
>>
> sorry, wrong language, you need
> echo "full date PST is ", date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime('now -8
> hours')), "<br>";
> If you define the constants in another file, then you can use them wherever
> eg $PST = -8;
I do hope you mean variable and not constant here...
> ...
> $dateString = 'now '.$PST.' hours';
> echo "full date PST is ", date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime($dateString)),
> "<br>";
>
> Tom
>
>> That definitely won't work; -0800 will be interpreted as an octal
>> value, but it's not a legal value. If it was interpreted as a decimal
>> value, it would subtract 800 minutes, which is no use to anyone.
>> Numeric offsets are supposed to work inside the strtotime string
>> param, according to the docs.
>>
>> Much of the point of using zone names rather than fixed numeric
>> offsets is that it allows for correct daylight savings calculations
>> (assuming that locale data is correct on the server).
>>
>> Let me rephrase the question - how can I get the current time in a
>> named time zone using strtotime and without using a numeric offset?
>>
>> Marcus

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