How to get Unix timestamp in php based on timezone

Question

Code first

    echo time() . '<br/>'; echo date('Y-m-d H:i:s') . '<br/>'; date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');   echo time() . '<br/>'; print_r($timezones[$timezone] . '<br/>'); echo date('Y-m-d H:i:s') . '<br/>'; 

In the above code the date is printed according to timezone but unix timestamp is same even after setting default timezone

How can we print unix timestamp according to timezone?

Answer 1

The answer provided by Volkerk (that says timestamps are meant to be always UTC based) is correct, but if you really need a workaround (to make timezone based timestamps) look at my example.

<?php  //default timezone $date = new DateTime(null); echo 'Default timezone: '.$date->getTimestamp().'<br />'."\r\n";  //America/New_York $date = new DateTime(null, new DateTimeZone('America/New_York')); echo 'America/New_York: '.$date->getTimestamp().'<br />'."\r\n";  //Europe/Amsterdam $date = new DateTime(null, new DateTimeZone('Europe/Amsterdam')); echo 'Europe/Amsterdam: '.$date->getTimestamp().'<br />'."\r\n";  echo 'WORK AROUND<br />'."\r\n"; // WORK AROUND //default timezone $date = new DateTime(null); echo 'Default timezone: '.($date->getTimestamp() + $date->getOffset()).'<br />'."\r\n";  //America/New_York $date = new DateTime(null, new DateTimeZone('America/New_York')); echo 'America/New_York: '.($date->getTimestamp() + $date->getOffset()).'<br />'."\r\n";  //Europe/Amsterdam $date = new DateTime(null, new DateTimeZone('Europe/Amsterdam')); echo 'Europe/Amsterdam: '.($date->getTimestamp() + $date->getOffset()).'<br />'."\r\n"; ?> 

Get the regular timestamp and add the UTC offset

Answer 2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time

Unix time, or POSIX time, is a system for describing instants in time, defined as the number of seconds elapsed since midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) of Thursday, January 1, 1970

The unix timestamp isn't affected by a timezone setting. Setting the timezone only affects the interpretation of the timestamp value.