My hosting server timezone is set to UTC, so all my dates are stored for that timezone. I am in Mountain time and would like the times adjusted to reflect that. I did quite a bit of searching that involved various solutions, such as adding and removing time to and from dates, formatting, and such. Some of them were very complicated and overdone.
I finally came across a few posts that I merged together to something rather simple that worked for my needs.
function tzAdjust($dateTimeString, $localTimezone, $dateTimeFormat) {
$dateTime = date_create($dateTimeString);
date_timezone_set($dateTime, timezone_open($localTimezone));
$adjustedDateTimeString = date_format($dateTime, $dateTimeFormat);
return $adjustedDateTimeString;
}
The function takes in a DateTime, a PHP timezone string, and a date format for the return.
date_create creates the DateTime object from a string date, such as '2019-10-08 09:56:06'.
date_timezone_set sets the timezone for that DateTime object ('America/Edmonton'), and does the adjustment.
date_format takes care of turning it into something readable, such as 'F j, Y H:i' - October 8, 2019 09:56.
This function can be safely called when the server and the client are in the same timezone.
