strange date time function results

safra

Hi,

I am trying to get the time difference between the server location and the UTC timezone.

I tried somethings with unix timestamps but the output is strange:

print date("l dS of F Y h:i:s A")." SERVER<br>";
print gmdate("l dS of F Y h:i:s A")." GMT<br>";
print mktime()." SERVER<br>";
print gmmktime()." GMT<br>";

the out put is:

Friday 30th of July 2004 07:58:24 AM SERVER
Friday 30th of July 2004 12:58:24 PM GMT
1091192304 SERVER
1091174304 GMT

According to the date and gmdate functions the GMT time is ahead of the server time. But the GMT timestamp is behind the server timestamp.

How is this possible?

Thanks,
Raoul

tsinka

Hi,

that depends on the timezone settings of the server. Which timezone is set on the server ?

Thomas

safra

Hi Thomas,

I am not sure what the timezone setting of the server is, I will look at that. But I do not understand how that explains what I described. The later it is, the higher the timestamp, correct? This is not the case in my example above. date() returns a date that is earlier then gmdate() but mktime returns a timestamp that is higher then gmmktime()?

Raoul

tsinka

Hi,

I tested a modified version of your script with two additional lines that print the two unix timestamps using date:

The setting on the server is GMT+2

Result:

Friday 30th of July 2004 09:09:47 AM SERVER
Friday 30th of July 2004 07:09:47 AM GMT
1091214587 SERVER
1091221787 GMT
Friday 30th of July 2004 09:09:47 AM
Friday 30th of July 2004 11:09:47 AM gm

So I think the following happens if you use these functions without the optional timestamp argument (the current date/time).

date just prints the string based on the current time on your server
gmdate calculates the gmt time based on the local time and the server's timezone setting (mydatetime-2 in my case)
-mktime just calculates the unix timestamp based on the current date/time
-gmmktime takes the current date/time on the server, takes this as GMT date/time info and returns a time based on the timezone setting on the server (in this case mydatetime+2)

date: currentdate
gmdate: currentdate-2
mktime: currentdate
gmmktime: currentdate_used_as_GMT+2 to translate it to my current timezone setting GMT+2

Sound a little bit strange but seems to be the expected behaviour.

Thomas