PHP set timezone

In this post, you will learn about the PHP set timezone.

PHP provides the date_default_timezone_set() in-built function which is used to set the default timezone used by all date/time functions in a script. This function returns False if the timezone is not valid, or True otherwise.

Syntax

bool date_default_timezone_set( $timezone_identifier )

Here, the $timezone_identifier sets the timezone identifier, like UTC or Asia/Kolkata. It accepts only the single parameter which is required.

Set the timezone in php.ini file

We can easily change the default timezone in PHP. For this, open the 'php.ini' file and find the date section like the following.

[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://php.net/date.timezone
;date.timezone ="UTC"

Here, uncomment the date.timezone and set its value to the timezone you need. Here, we have changed the default PHP timezone to 'Asia/Calcutta'. Now, save and exit the 'php.ini' file and restart the server. The timezone settings should now be modified. This is the timezone used by all PHP date/time functions in your scripts.

[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://php.net/date.timezone
date.timezone = "Asia/Calcutta"

You can get a list of all the valid timezones from here - http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php

PHP set timezone in procedural way

We can also set the timezone by changing it in the code without touching the ini file. At the beginning of your code, add the following code and set the timezome. This is the procedural style to set the timezone.

<?php
date_default_timezone_set('America/Los_Angeles');
echo date_default_timezone_get();
?>

America/Los_Angeles

PHP set timezone in object-oriented style

We can also set the time zone for the DateTime object in an object-oriented way. Here is the syntax -

public DateTime::setTimezone(DateTimeZone $timezone): DateTime

The following example demonstrates how to set the timezone in object-oriented way in PHP code.

<?php
$date = new DateTime('2020-05-09', new DateTimeZone('America/New_York'));
echo $date->format('Y-m-d H:i:sP')."<br/>";

$date->setTimezone(new DateTimeZone('Europe/London'));
echo $date->format('Y-m-d H:i:sP')."<br/>";
?>

2020-05-09 00:00:00-04:00
2020-05-09 05:00:00+01:00

PHP check for timezone

We can compare the set timezone with the ini set timezone.

<?php
// Set timezone
date_default_timezone_set('Asia/Kolkata');
  
// get created timezone 
$timezone_object = date_default_timezone_get();
  
// Compare the timezone with ini-set timezone
if (strcmp($timezone_object, ini_get('date.timezone'))){
    echo 'Script timezone differs from ini-set timezone.';
} else {
    echo 'Script timezone and ini-set timezone match.';
}
?>

Script timezone differs from ini-set timezone.

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