👀 Views: 9168 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-12

php datetime timezone date PHP

I'm working on a personal project and I'm working with an scenario where the `date()` function in PHP seems to output incorrect dates when converting from UTC to a specific time zone... I'm using PHP 8.1 and have set my default time zone to 'America/New_York' using `date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');`. However, when I try to convert a UTC timestamp into a formatted date string, the output does not reflect the expected local time. For example, when I run the following code: ```php $dateUtc = '2023-10-12 16:00:00'; // UTC Time $dateTime = new DateTime($dateUtc, new DateTimeZone('UTC')); $dateTime->setTimezone(new DateTimeZone('America/New_York')); $formattedDate = $dateTime->format('Y-m-d H:i:s'); print($formattedDate); ``` I expect the output to be '2023-10-12 12:00:00' (4 PM UTC should convert to 12 PM EST), but instead, I am getting '2023-10-12 16:00:00'. To troubleshoot, I've ensured that my server's time zone settings are correctly configured and that the PHP ini settings reflect this. I also tried using `DateTimeImmutable`, but the result was the same. What could I be missing that would result in this unexpected behavior? My development environment is Ubuntu. For context: I'm using Php on Linux. Is there a better approach? This is happening in both development and production on Debian. Thanks for taking the time to read this! This is part of a larger web app I'm building. Thanks in advance!