How to convert time from one timezone to another in PHP

Question

I have a code see below. The time zone for the time 16:17 is Europe/Vilnius. My goal is to apply time zone $tz2 = 'Africa/Dakar' and get 16:17 time in Africa/Dakar time zone.

$tz1 = 'Europe/Vilnius';
$tz2 = 'Africa/Dakar';
$a='16';
$b='17';
$match_time = date("H:i", strtotime($a.":".$b));
$dt1 = new DateTime($match_time, $tz1);
$dt2 = new DateTime($match_time, $tz2);

echo "match date".$match_time;
echo "dt1".$dt1;
echo "dt2".$dt2;

I tried many ways to do that. Right now this code gives me an error:

FATAL ERROR Uncaught Error: Call to a member function format() on string in /home4/phptest/public_html/code.php70(5) : eval()'d code:8 Stack trace: #0 /home4/phptest/public_html/code.php70(5): eval() #1 {main} thrown on line number 8

My question how to fix a code to get the result, and is this a convenient way to do such conversion?

Answer 1

date_default_timezone_set('Europe/London');

$datetime = new DateTime('2008-08-03 12:35:23');
echo $datetime->format('Y-m-d H:i:s') . "\n";
$la_time = new DateTimeZone('America/Los_Angeles');
$datetime->setTimezone($la_time);
echo $datetime->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');

Answer 2

The type of the argument is a DateTimeZone for the DateTime. You are passing a string.

You can do it like this:

$tz1 = 'Europe/Vilnius';
$tz2 = 'Africa/Dakar';
$a='16';
$b='17';
$match_time = date("H:i", strtotime($a.":".$b));
$dt1 = new DateTime($match_time, new DateTimeZone($tz1));
$dt2 = new DateTime($match_time, new DateTimeZone($tz2));

echo "match date".$match_time;
echo "dt1".$dt1->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');
echo "dt2".$dt2->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');

To echo the DateTime you can use format.

Answer 3

You can't just pass timezone as string in a second argument. You have to create new instance of DateTimeZone class with timezone name as constructor parameter. For example:

<?php
$dt = new DateTime("16:17", new DateTimeZone('Europe/Warsaw'));