How do I get a visitor's time zone in PHP?

Question

Is there a way to find out visitors' timezone in PHP?

Answer 1

You can't do it alone with PHP as that information is not available. However, if you know the user's location you may be able to do some geo-locating and determine a probably timezone.

You need javascript's help. I googled the following JS snippet which returns the client's timezone offset:

var tzo=(new Date().gettimezoneoffset()/60)*(-1); 

From here, you can set a cookie with JS which is accessible with PHP. Alternativly, you could grab this information with an ajax call.