How to I accurately get current UTC time via strtotime?

Question

In PHP, how do I get the current time, in UTC, without hard coding knowledge of where my hosting provider is?

For example, I tried the following:

time() + strtotime('January 1, 2000')-strtotime('January 1, 2000 UTC')

and find that it reports a time that is one hour ahead of actual UTC time. I tried this on two different hosting providers in two different time zones with the same results.

Is there a reliable (and, hopefully, cleaner) way to accurately get the UTC time?

I am limited to PHP 4.4.9 so I cannot use the new timezone stuff added to PHP5.

Thanks, in advance.

Just to check, are the hosting providers in the same time zone as you are? You might try checking the output of date("T") to see. — Tom, Sep 23 '09 at 04:33
@Tom: That would work if the OP can assume his provider is in a certain region. The problem with `date("T")` is that for example "EST" might by the North American EST or the Australian EST. — MitMaro, Sep 23 '09 at 04:46
I was just fishing for information. See my answer below for a solution that would appear to work in all cases. Your point about time zone abrev. is well taken and something that I've never had to deal with since all my servers are in the U.S. — Tom, Sep 23 '09 at 04:49

score 13 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 23 '09 at 12:26

13

$time = new DateTime('now', new DateTimeZone('UTC'));
echo $time->format('F j, Y H:i:s');

answered Sep 23 '09 at 12:26

GZipp

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Thanks for your answer. Although this doesn't work for PHP 4.4.9, it does work fine on the other PHP 5.2. – Dave Sep 24 '09 at 05:48
Sorry, apparently my reading comprehension was off when I read your question. Glad to have helped anyway. – GZipp Sep 24 '09 at 13:41
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but was nevertheless valuable for other peopl – shealtiel Aug 30 '11 at 23:47

Tom · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-23T05:02:09.543

8

This seems to work for me. Of course, you'll need to test it on PHP 4 since all of my servers have PHP 5, but the manual claims this should work for PHP 4.

$t = time();
$x = $t+date("Z",$t);
echo strftime("%B %d, %Y @ %H:%M:%S UTC", $x);

First time around, I forgot that the date could change between the call to time() and date().

edited Sep 23 '09 at 05:02

answered Sep 23 '09 at 04:46

Tom

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Much better then using `date("T")`. Well worth a +1. – MitMaro Sep 23 '09 at 04:59
Thanks, and I had given you a +1 for the comment above. – Tom Sep 23 '09 at 05:03
I was just browsing through the PHP Manual and ran accross gmdate. So, something like this: echo gmdate("H:i:s")." UTC"; should work as well. – Tom Oct 03 '09 at 17:42

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Oct 01 '13 at 09:52

0

$utcTtime = gmmktime();
$unixTimestamp = time();

gmmktime: Get Unix timestamp for a GMT date

edited Oct 01 '13 at 09:52

Timo Huovinen

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answered Sep 23 '09 at 12:31

Stefan Gehrig

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 01 '13 at 09:51

0

Does this work for php 4.4.9?

echo gmdate('Y-m-d H:i:s', time());

or if you want it for a specific date:

$time = strtotime('January 1, 2000 UTC');
if($time){
    echo gmdate('Y-m-d H:i:s', $time);
}

answered Oct 01 '13 at 09:51

Timo Huovinen

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How to I accurately get current UTC time via strtotime?

4 Answers4