Title: Using PHP Timezone
Last modified: August 20, 2016

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# Using PHP Timezone

 *  Resolved [Peter Wooster](https://wordpress.org/support/users/pkwooster/)
 * (@pkwooster)
 * [14 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/using-php-timezone/)
 * Both PHP and WordPress keep timezone information, and it is often different. 
   For example my server runs in UTC and my WordPress uses EST. If you use the PHP
   time and date functions such as strtotime, you will end up working in your server’s
   timezone.
 * I’ve seen a lot of code that then does
    `$myTime + get_option( 'gmt_offset' )*
   3600;` to adjust the resulting time. This mostly works, but some things will 
   surprise you. For example if you use strtotime to convert a ‘time only’ string
   before midnight your time but after midnight GMT (Eg. 9pm EST) the result will
   be tomorrow instead of today after you adjust for the offset, since it is already
   tomorrow in Greenwich.
 * To get this to work properly you need to tell PHP what the correct offset is 
   so it can do its magic properly. This is done using code like
 *     ```
       $gofs = get_option( 'gmt_offset' ); // get WordPress offset in hours
       $tz = date_default_timezone_get(); // get current PHP timezone
       date_default_timezone_set('Etc/GMT'.(($gofs < 0)?'+':'').-$gofs); // set the PHP timezone to match WordPress
       // your code goes here
       date_default_timezone_set($tz); // set the PHP timezone back the way it was
       ```
   
 * The ‘Etc/GMT’ timezone is PHP’s offset from Greenwich (GMT/UTC) timezone name.
   The offset is the negative of the one used by WordPress and it must be preceded
   by a + or -. When done, it’s good to set it back since some other code may be
   doing the same sort of thing.
 * I hope this is of assistance to others who need to validate time and date values
   entered by users, or do other timezone related code.
 * /peter

The topic ‘Using PHP Timezone’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [date](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/date/)
 * [time](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/time/)
 * [timezone](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/timezone/)

 * In: [Hacks](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/plugins-and-hacks/hacks/)
 * 0 replies
 * 1 participant
 * Last reply from: [Peter Wooster](https://wordpress.org/support/users/pkwooster/)
 * Last activity: [14 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/using-php-timezone/)
 * Status: resolved

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