How to find day of week in php in a specific timezone

Question

$dw = date( "w", $timestamp);

Where $dw will be 0 (for Sunday) through 6 (for Saturday) as you can see here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

My solution is this:

$tempDate = '2012-07-10';
echo date('l', strtotime( $tempDate));

Output is: Tuesday

$tempDate = '2012-07-10';
echo date('D', strtotime( $tempDate));

Output is: Tue

I think this is the correct answer, just change Europe/Stockholm to the users time-zone.

$dateTime = new \DateTime(
    'now',
    new \DateTimeZone('Europe/Stockholm')
);
$day = $dateTime->format('N');

ISO-8601 numeric representation of the day of the week (added in PHP 5.1.0) 1 (for Monday) through 7 (for Sunday)

http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

For a list of supported time-zones, see http://php.net/manual/en/timezones.php

Thanks a lot guys for your quick comments.

This is what i will be using now. Posting the function here so that somebody may use it.

public function getDayOfWeek($pTimezone)
{

    $userDateTimeZone = new DateTimeZone($pTimezone);
    $UserDateTime = new DateTime("now", $userDateTimeZone);

    $offsetSeconds = $UserDateTime->getOffset(); 
    //echo $offsetSeconds;

    return gmdate("l", time() + $offsetSeconds);

}

Report if you find any corrections.

Another quick way:

date_default_timezone_set($userTimezone);
echo date("l");

If you can get their timezone offset, you can just add it to the current timestamp and then use the gmdate function to get their local time.

// let's say they're in the timezone GMT+10
$theirOffset = 10;  // $_GET['offset'] perhaps?
$offsetSeconds = $theirOffset * 3600;
echo gmdate("l", time() + $offsetSeconds);

$myTimezone = date_default_timezone_get();
date_default_timezone_set($userTimezone);
$userDay = date('l', $userTimestamp);
date_default_timezone_set($myTimezone);

This should work (didn't test it, so YMMV). It works by storing the script's current timezone, changing it to the one specified by the user, getting the day of the week from the date() function at the specified timestamp, and then setting the script's timezone back to what it was to begin with.

You might have some adventures with timezone identifiers, though.