Re: [PHP] Using DateTimeZone

Jochem Maas wrote:
Lester Caine schreef:
Lester Caine wrote:
Lester Caine wrote:
I'm looking to tidy up things a bit by clearing out a lot of old code
and switching to using the internal DateTime functions.

Information is stored in the databases UTC normalized, and we get
around the problem of getting a real tz offset by getting the users
to register it rather than simply relying on the browser. So dates
and times are displayed either UTC or user local time. The server
defaults are not relevant, as only the user details should be used.
OK cracked the first bit - need an '@' in place of the "U"

The thing that I am having a little trouble establishing is the
correct way to take a UTC unix epoch timestamp from the data and
display it with the users timezone offset.

$dateTimeZoneUser = new DateTimeZone("user's setting");
$dateTimeUser =
new DateTime( date( "U", $datetime_to_display ), $dateTimeZoneUser );
new DateTime( '@'.$datetime_to_display, $dateTimeZoneUser );
Completing the circle slowly ....
$dateTimeUser = new DateTime( '@'.$datetime_to_display);
$dateTimeUser->setTimeZone( $dateTimeZoneUser );

$date = $dateTimeUser->format( DATE_ATOM );
But of cause the bit of the jigsaw I forgot is that this needs
translating to the correct language. format does not respect 'setlocale'
setting? How do I get this translated to the users language as well as
their timezone?

DATE_ATOM is a locale independent format AFAICT.
Documenting that may be useful ;)
But I switched to other formats and the bottom line seems to be that like DATE_ATOM - '@'. is timezone independent, so one has to apply the required timezone AFTER loading the 'epoch'. $dateTimeZoneUser is only used if there is no 'timezone' information contained IN the supplied time? More missing information from the documentation?

secondly, and I think this is rather odd, DateTime uses the same
formatting code as date() ... which only does english, to quote:

<quote from=http://php.net/date>
To format dates in other languages, you should use the setlocale() and strftime() functions instead of date().
</quote>
Yep ... a right pain converting from ADOdb Date structure and format
Along with the problem that DateTime does not handle genealogical dates either - which ADOdb::Date does.

and seeing as you don't seem to be able to retrieve the timestamp
that the DateTime object represents in order to feed it to strftime()
you *** out of luck. ... well you could do something like the following
but it makes me feel like maybe one should avoid DateTime until
it's somewhat more flexible/complete:
The problem is how to add daylight saving *TO* ADOdb dates
That is without breaking anything else.

<?php

setlocale(LC_TIME, "nl_NL.ISO8859-1");
$d = new DateTime();
echo strftime("%A, %d %B %Y", strtotime($d->format(DATE_ATOM))), "\n";

?>
BUT what I need is the GMT/BST flag - or the equivalent in that local :(
I'm structuring a question on internals about the things that do not work right in DateTime ;)

--
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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